The geography of cheese: Can the place you live determine the cheese you like?

Whether you like a Danish blue or some Red Leicester, there’s a cheese to please everyone. Here at the Co-op we have been carefully scouring our stores across the UK to see which fromage can claim the title of ‘The Big Cheese’ – with some surprising results:

Those in Wales and the South West adore strong flavours in their cheese, snapping up 17% more mature cheese in Co-op stores than the rest of the UK and 17% more blue than their regional neighbours. People living in the North can’t stand the stuff, though, we sell 20% less mature and blue at local Co-ops. They’re also opposed on cottage cheese: the North love it, snapping up 27% more than the rest of the country. In Wales, they’re down 9% on the curd-like concoction.

Live in the South East? You’re bound to have had some goat’s cheese in your weekly shop. With 26% more sales in that region, this adventurous lot love trying something different. The Central and Eastern regions are not such big fans, with sales down on both goat’s and soft continental cheese 7% compared to the average.

In the North West, you’ll probably prefer a milder cheese as our Co-op stores there shift 17% more of the stuff, but 8% less mature cheddar. They also hate light cheese – but not as much as those north of the borders in Scotland and Northern Ireland. There, there’s a drastic decrease of 31%. They much prefer processed and grated cheese, as 8% more of it flies off our shelves compared with the rest of the UK.

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*Statistics sourced from Co-op sales data – six week net sales penetration by region over April/May 2014.