Cashel Blue still going strong during recession
The Irish Times has the story on Cashel Blue and the Grubb family, who are plugging along through hard times, and doing just fine:
For the Grubb family, making a living from an 80-acre dairy farm in the 1980s was no joke. With butter mountains and milk lakes dotted across Europe, they knew they needed to add value to the milk they produced.
And so Cashel Blue, Ireland’s first blue cheese, was born. Making cheese at the kitchen table and maturing it under the house, the Grubbs quickly realised they were on to something.
“Nobody made blue cheese on a farm in Ireland,” says Sarah Furno, daughter of Cashel Blue’s founder, Louis Grubb, and now both general manager and “cheese maturer” at the company.
With 25 tonnes of Danish blue cheese imported into the State every year, the family’s original objective was for its cheese to become an import substitute. By 1985, however, they were exporting to Britain. Marks Spencer became a customer in the 1990s.
