In January, British cottage cheese brand All Things entered the cottage cheese market with a product designed to reinvigorate the category. Four months later, the company had sold a million pots across UK retail, including becoming the best-selling cottage cheese SKU on e-commerce platform Ocado.
The exponential growth reflects heightened demand for the dairy curd, which for decades had fallen out of fashion.
“The category has been underloved in the last 20-odd years,” said All Things co-founder, Toby Hopkinson. “It’s become very uncool. Brand innovation hadn’t happened until relatively recently.”
While a lot of the growth is likely down to market velocity, a significant part is down to marketing – and specifically, showing what consumers can do with the product by applying it to recipes. “Lots of people are using in pasta sauce and just blending it down; lots of dips,” Hopkinson said. “It’s been great to see how far people can push it from a versatility perspective.”
The secret to repeat demand is also tied to the creamy texture that All Things’ product has. It’s produced at Yester Farm Dairies, a Scottish cheesemaker with 50 years’ experience in cottage cheese.
“A lot of lower‑end cottage cheeses on the market are quite watery and a bit grainy,” Hopkinson said. “That’s often because whey is added back in as the dressing, alongside the cultures.
“The approach we take is different: instead of whey, we add back the cream that’s naturally produced as part of making cottage cheese, along with the cultures. The result is a much more velvety, stracciatella‑like texture, rather than the thinner, more granular alternatives that tend to dominate the category.”
But the demand explosion means supply constraints are starting to bite. Yester Farm Dairies supply multiple brands – and needs to scale up its manufacturing and co-packing business, fast.
For All Things, their product is tied to that very specific, grass-fed creamy product the farm produces: so simply moving production elsewhere isn’t a long-term option.
“We love the product that Yester puts out,” Hopkinson said. “And if we were going to keep up with demand, we would likely have had to go elsewhere to find additional capacity. Right now, we are right on the edge – we have a short-term fixed that can that we can increase capacity about 20%-25% until September.”
The ultimate answer was investment in Yester – to fund upgrades in machinery, increase production capacity, and create a stronger platform for future innovation.
“The first stage is upgrading the machinery they already have in place,” Hopkinson said. “Then, we’re putting in another couple of lines, with the aim that by the end of the year we can double Yester’s capacity.
“This is very much phase one. From the end of this year, our ambition is to start scoping out phase two, so this will continue to evolve over the next two to three years.
“For now, our focus is on getting this initial expansion locked in, funding it through our own investment. That should then put the business in a really strong position to fund much of its future growth organically, based on its own performance.”
As for the company’s butter business – which landed in the premium butter category three years ago – this is very much staying in an adjacent lane, despite being slower to grow.
“We still see butter as a real core part of the business,” said Hopkinson. “It’s quite steady, our supply chain on that side is very robust, and it generally just works like clockwork, helped by the product’s long shelf life.
“In May, we’re launching our butter into Tesco, which is a huge moment for us.”
US: Demand triggers supply investment
Capacity expansion is also underway in the US, where cottage cheese brand Good Culture has secured fresh backing from private equity firm L Catterton to support its next growth phase.
The deal, which reportedly values the business at more than $500m, will fund scale‑up efforts while allowing the brand’s management team to retain control over product innovation and brand direction.
