The people of Nantwich have a lot to be proud of. Janet Reeder meets three of its biggest fans.
Michael Heler
MD, Joseph Heler Cheese
'We are always known as Joseph Heler and we are always associated with the name Nantwich'
I’m Nantwich born and Nantwich bred. I left school and came straight into the business in 1975. When my father Joseph started making cheese in 1957 there were 62 Cheshire cheesemakers and as the old story goes there were some very poor farmers and very good cheesemakers, or very good farmers and poor cheesemakers. We are among the handful that are left.
The secret of our success? My father used a word: ‘stickability’, meaning if you were fairly persistent in what you did and you stuck at it, you’d survive. The reason why there are no longer 62 cheesemakers in Cheshire is because technical standards have improved pasteurisation and as these were ramped up more and more people got out of the industry. What we did was always try to work around what the consumer wanted, not create a product we wanted and consumer didn’t. You have to produce what the market tells you to produce.
We take milk from 145 farms within a 45-mile radius of our factory. It’s very competitive and we can’t just pick the farms we want because farmers can sell to who they like and in this region alone there are about 10 different buyers of farm milk. You’ve got to pay a good price, provide an attractive milk contract that suits that individual farmer’s needs, and you have to be financially robust so the farmer has every confidence he’s going to get paid.
We’ve always had a great affinity to Nantwich. We have timbers in the main farmhouse here that were rescued in the great fire in Nantwich of 1583. My mother, Cynthia, throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, would take our whey butter and cheese into the local butchers and the Churche’s Mansions restaurant. We support the museum with both equipment and knowledge too, so we’ve always had a strong link to the town.
As a company we’ve expanded in a number of ways: we’ve bought a new factory in Skegness, it’s a cheese-waxing business and we send our cheese there to make our 300-gram truckles and we’ve acquired an online business called Cheshire Cheese, which sells all our cheese online including our branded cheese: Eatlean, Mouse House and Nibble Nose. We’ve also bought a secondary packing factory at Porthmadog in Wales. So we manufacture all our cheese in Nantwich and then send it to Wales. We now have a shop and bistro serving toasties at Crewe Market Hall, which has music, bars and beers.
We produce about 20,000 tonnes of cheese a year and export nearly 20 per cent of our cheese to around 40 countries, predominantly America and Brazil, then across to Germany and Spain, then we go to Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore and into Australia.
We are always known as Joseph Heler and we are always associated with the name Nantwich.
Christine Farrall
Chair, Nantwich Food Festival
'I’ve lived in Nantwich for about 50 years; it’s such a super place and I am very lucky to call it my home town'
I am so privileged to be chair of the Nantwich Food Festival because it is such a wonderful community venture. It’s a free festival run by volunteers and I think it must be the largest of its kind in the UK. It takes over the whole of the town centre so local traders are involved as well as the local community. It's such a fun three days.
It was set up about 21 years ago and started on Mill Island across the River Weaver. Over the past few years, we have brought it into town. People had to go out of main town and buy tickets as it was a pay job then, but now the market traders are happy, and all the shop owners are thrilled because they can take part by having a stall, or we can promote their business.
People who come for the event look at the town with its Georgian and Elizabethan architecture and its independent shops and see it’s a lovely place. When the festival is over visitors come back and take advantage of the beautiful surroundings. It’s a bonus all the way around. Everyone wins.
The number of people attending over the three days is probably going upwards to 40,000 and if it weren't for the volunteers, we wouldn’t have a festival. We also have the support of sponsors and the councils – they all join in. This year's festival will run from September 1 to 3. We have official meetings once a month and sub meetings that take place in local tea rooms and pubs. We have a visitors' team, the sponsors' team, entertainment and chefs' team, business and liaison team, project management, volunteers, finance, press and marketing, design and print and waste, recycling and security.
We are very grateful to Cheshire East Council, which allows us to use the car parks even though it loses the revenue, and Nantwich Town Council is very helpful with grants.
I’ve lived in Nantwich for about 50 years; it’s such a super place and I am very lucky to call it my home town.
In my previous life I was a head teacher in Crewe and when I retired I looked round for something to do and they asked me to join Nantwich Town Council where I found out about the many community groups in the town. After being Mayor of Nantwich I decided to stand down from the council and concentrate on helping various community groups. One day, I was invited to lunch by the president of the Nantwich Food Festival and when I came out, I found I’d been elected chair. I feel so honoured that they asked me.
David Pritchard
MD, Applewood Independent (financial advisers)
'Nantwich is an absolutely fantastic place to live, with true community spirit'
I started the business in October 1998 so this year will be our 25th anniversary. However, I only moved to Nantwich eight and a half years ago, with my wife Kay, and we now live a mile and a half away from the office. We are full directors of the business, along with our son Alex and one of the other team members.
Nantwich is an absolutely fantastic place to live, with true community spirit. It is obviously a very old market town and has a history going back to the English Civil War and there are some buildings dating back to 1640 that are still here, such as The Crown Hotel and Churche’s Mansions.
There is a dedicated community of volunteers who organise so many things including the Christmas tree, the Holly Holy Day re-enactment, Nantwich Show, the Food Festival, running the museum on a shoestring, running the foodbank on a shoestring, and the very vibrant football club as well as the (also vibrant) Crewe and Nantwich Rugby Club. These are all run by people who give their time and effort, and this creates a real community, something I think has been lost in a lot of other towns and cities.
The fact is that Nantwich still has an identity and puts on all these fantastic events. There are about 17,000 residents, but the food festival attracts 40,000 people over the weekend, which more than doubles its population. As a business we have been very grateful to Nantwich and its community and we give our support financially to help keep events and organisations going.
South Cheshire is a very successful area so it made good sense to put tour business into what is a lovely town to work in and which has given us so many opportunities; we are now the biggest independent financial adviser in this area. We sponsor the Food Festival and support Nantwich Show in whatever way we can. We help the food bank, and even buy the Christmas tree for the town and I get the honour of switching it on every year. We don’t do all this to promote the business, we do it to give back to the town and the people of Nantwich.
There are plenty of good places to eat in and around the town and I am especially interested as main sponsor of the Food Festival – not that I’m involved in the judging by the way. I am coeliac and the number of places where I can now eat out has increased dramatically.
From our point of view, it’s really important for Nantwich to keep doing things to attract people. We need our independent shops to flourish and need to maintain those we have, to bring visitors to the town. We need our businesses to continue to be independent – that is so important for small towns like ours.
