Cheese people know an enormous amount about how cheese can be cooked, served, paired and enjoyed. Makers know what happens when their cheese is melted, baked, crumbled or grated. Mongers answer questions every day about what to serve with a particular cheese, what to cook with leftovers and what to choose for different occasions.
Recipes are one way of turning that knowledge into something useful for customers. But we’ve started wondering whether cheese recipes could do quite a bit more than simply provide cooking inspiration.
A good recipe can help somebody discover a cheese they’ve never tried, understand how to use it and feel more confident buying it. It can introduce them to the maker behind it, help them find somewhere to buy it and give them a reason to return to a cheesemaker or cheesemonger’s website later.
That makes recipes potentially useful not just as content, but as part of the wider journey towards discovering and buying cheese.
Recipes can reach people before they’re looking for a cheese business
Someone searching online for “what can I make with leftover Stilton?” probably isn’t looking for a cheesemaker or cheesemonger, they have a problem to solve. The same is be true of somebody looking for ideas for a Christmas cheeseboard, wondering what to cook with goat’s cheese or searching for a simple blue cheese sauce.
A useful recipe can answer that immediate question while introducing the person to something else at the same time. From one recipe, they might go on to:
- Discover a cheese they haven’t tried before
- Learn more about a particular maker
- Find a local cheesemonger or stockist
- Explore similar cheeses
- Find another recipe
- Join an email list
- Visit a shop
- Buy the cheese used in the recipe
That is quite a lot of potential value from a piece of content that may originally have been created simply to answer “what can I cook with this?”.
The knowledge already exists
The useful thing is that we don’t need to invent all of this knowledge from scratch. Cheesemakers, mongers, educators and cooks across the sector already have recipes, serving ideas, pairing suggestions and practical knowledge that customers would find useful. The challenge is often finding the time and tools to turn that knowledge into good online content.
Publishing a recipe properly can also be more involved than it first appears. There is the recipe itself, but also images, preparation times, portions, ingredients, instructions, categories, cheese information and related content.
If you want the recipe to be presented in a structured way that search engines and other digital services can understand, there can be another layer of technical setup too. That often means installing and paying for a specialist recipe plugin, working out how to configure it and then fitting it into the rest of the website.
For a business publishing dozens of recipes, that may be worth it. For somebody who wants to publish a handful of useful cheese recipes each year, it can feel like quite a lot of infrastructure.
Are we all solving the same recipe problem separately?
This is where the idea starts to overlap with a wider question we keep coming back to across The Cheese Network. How many cheese businesses are paying separately to solve essentially the same digital problem?
One cheesemaker buys a recipe plugin. Another uses a different one. A cheesemonger builds a recipe layout into their website. Somebody else gives up because the setup feels too complicated.
Each business then has to work out what information to include, how recipes should be structured and how they should connect back to the cheese being featured.
Could some of that work be shared?
Perhaps there is a common structure that works well for cheese recipes. Perhaps there are pieces of technology we could build once. Perhaps the things we learn from one business could improve what is available to the next.
That doesn’t mean every recipe should look or sound the same. The recipe, photography, story, cheese and personality should still belong to the business that created it. The shared bit would simply make publishing and using that knowledge easier.
What should a good cheese recipe actually include?
This is one of the first things worth exploring. At the simplest level, a recipe needs ingredients and instructions. But a useful cheese recipe could potentially include much more context around the cheese itself.
For example:
- The cheese used
- The cheesemaker
- Suggested alternative cheeses
- Preparation and cooking times
- Portions
- Serving suggestions
- Pairings
- Related products
- Where to buy the cheese
- Similar recipes
- The occasion or season
- Advice on leftovers or storage where relevant
Not every recipe would need every field. The point is to work out which pieces of information genuinely help the person cooking and which help them continue exploring afterwards.
If we can agree on a useful shared recipe structure, that could then become a guide, template or publishing tool that different businesses can use in their own way.
Could we make publishing recipes easier?
One practical idea we’re exploring is a simple recipe plugin designed around the needs of cheese businesses using WordPress. The aim wouldn’t be to compete with every commercial recipe platform. There are already sophisticated tools available for businesses that need them.
It would be to ask whether there is a sensible shared option for cheesemakers and mongers who want to publish good, structured recipes without each needing to buy and configure a separate premium plugin.
A shared tool could start relatively simply and improve as more businesses use it, tell us what is missing and suggest changes. That is one of the advantages of approaching the problem together. Instead of one business commissioning an improvement that only exists on its own website, a useful improvement could potentially benefit everybody using the shared tool.
What if a recipe could live in more than one place?
There is another idea that could make this much more interesting. The best place for a cheesemaker’s recipe is often their own website. That is where people can learn about the cheese, understand the business and find the next useful step. So we wouldn’t want a shared project to replace that.
But what if publishing a recipe on your own site could also help it reach a wider audience?
Over time, there could be an opportunity to bring recipes from different makers, mongers and contributors together into a larger cheese recipe resource.
Someone might browse by:
- Cheese
- Cheese style
- Maker
- Country or region
- Meal
- Season
- Occasion
- Ingredient
- Cooking method
The shared recipe could then point people back towards the cheese, maker, monger or other business behind it.
That creates a different model from simply taking somebody’s content and republishing it elsewhere. The aim would be to use shared discovery to send more people towards the businesses creating the recipes in the first place.
Shared recipes could support shared campaigns too
Recipes also lend themselves naturally to seasonal and collaborative campaigns. Christmas leftovers are an obvious example. So are summer picnics, barbecue season, autumn comfort food or ideas for using up the remains of a cheeseboard.
Different businesses could contribute their own cheeses, recipes and perspective while taking part in a wider shared theme. One campaign might therefore bring together a blue cheese recipe from one maker, a washed-rind recipe from another, a cheesemonger’s leftovers guide and a collection of related products or serving ideas.
Everyone keeps their own content and identity, but the shared theme makes it easier to reach a wider audience. That feels much more useful than asking everybody to publish essentially the same generic seasonal article.
We could learn from what people are looking for
If enough useful recipe content exists, there is also an opportunity to learn from how people use it.
We could start to understand things such as:
- Which cheeses people most often look for recipes about
- Which questions appear repeatedly
- Which recipe themes attract the most interest
- Which seasonal topics return every year
- Which recipes encourage people to explore a cheese or maker
- Where there are gaps in useful content
- Which recipe ideas businesses might want to create next
We would need enough activity before any of that became genuinely meaningful. But the long-term opportunity is interesting because it turns recipe content into a source of shared learning.
That learning could then feed back into future recipes, campaigns and practical guidance for businesses across the Network.
The bit we need to find out first
Before we build anything substantial, we need to know whether this solves a problem that cheesemakers and cheesemongers actually care about.
We’d like to understand how businesses are using recipes today and what gets in the way of doing more with them.
Some of the questions we’re interested in are:
- Do you currently publish recipes on your website?
- Do people actually find and use them?
- Do they bring useful website traffic or customer enquiries?
- What stops you publishing more?
- What tools or plugins are you currently using?
- Is the technology an unnecessary cost or frustration?
- What information do you think every cheese recipe should include?
- What would you like somebody to do after reading one of your recipes?
- Would a simple shared recipe publishing tool be useful?
- Would you be comfortable with selected recipes also appearing in a wider cheese recipe resource?
We’re just as interested in hearing from businesses that don’t publish recipes. Understanding why something isn’t worth the time, is too difficult to maintain or simply hasn’t worked can be just as useful as hearing about successes.
Could we make more of the recipes the cheese sector already has?
There are several directions this could eventually go in. It could be as simple as creating better guidance for writing and structuring cheese recipes. It could lead to a shared recipe format, a WordPress plugin, seasonal recipe campaigns or a wider consumer recipe resource.
Some of those ideas may prove useful. Others may not. The first step is simply to understand whether there is a shared opportunity here and which part of it would create the most value.
The question we’re interested in is: Could better recipe content and shared recipe tools help more people discover, understand, cook with and ultimately buy more cheese?
If you already publish recipes, have a collection sitting somewhere that deserves more attention, pay for a recipe plugin, regularly give customers recipe ideas or simply have an opinion about what would make cheese recipes more useful online, we’d like to hear from you. Your experience could help shape what we explore next.
