The Cheese Advent Calendar Is A Crushing Disappointment

Midway through the month, it’s time to assess the pros and cons of the much-lauded cheesy Christmas novelty treat.

The Cheese Advent Calendar story is a great tale of invention and innovation from an independent single person with a great idea – the company So Wrong It’s Nom coming up with the rather brilliant concept and managing to sell it to one of Britain’s biggest cheese producers, Ilchester and getting it onto shelves for the first time in 2017. You can now find the advent calendar each year in supermarkets across the country – what a triumph for individual ingenuity.

I’ve been a big fan of the idea of the Cheese Advent Calendar for years but until this year, I’d never actually bought one. In previous years, I wasn’t going out specifically looking for it and when I did find one, it was usually in a battered box early in December, the remaining stock that had been pawed over and then rejected by other shoppers. It didn’t really seem worth the price and effort at that point.

This year though, there they were, on display in pride of place in Lidl in late November, all in mint condition and daring me not to buy. I decided that, although I had certain doubts about the execution over the concept, I’d give it a go – a tenner for 24 snack-sized pieces of individual cheese didn’t seem excessively expensive and at its very worst, this was still going to be a tasty daily treat. I love cheese, as any sensible person does, and so this was never going to be money wasted in that sense.

Cheese is an endlessly fascinating food product, available in so many variations of style and flavouring, strength and production technique. I imagine that you could eat a different type of cheese every day of the year and still have room for more. I suspect that you could manage a month or more just working through differing types of Cheddar. It seemed to me, then, that an advent calendar could – and should – have a different type of cheese for each day as the minimum requirement. However, this is not the case. There are, in fact, 11 cheeses in this collection – eight from Ilchester and three from guest cheese manufacturers Applewood. Seven of these are Cheddars, three are Red Leicesters and one is a Double Gloucester. So not only is there a degree of similarity at work here, but also a certain amount of repetition. We get regular, smoked, vintage and aged Cheddars, as well as versions with caramelised onion, chilli and apple, onion and sage.

Now, I adore Cheddar – at the risk of sounding unadventurous, I think that Cheddar is the king of cheeses, the perfect example of the craft and its massive popularity is for good reason. I particularly love a vintage Cheddar and one that is infused with interesting flavours – a Mexicana Cheddar is a magnificent thing. But I also enjoy many other sorts of cheese – I don’t think I’ve ever met a cheese I didn’t enjoy – and so i wonder why this collection is so repetitive. I suspect it is because the included flavours are all the ones that Ilchester produce as individual sticks. Maybe they are all the cheeses that Ilchester make. I should probably go and find out, but in a way, it is neither here nor there. Just as pubs owned by breweries will often have a selection of drinks from other companies on sale, surely a project like this doesn’t have to be so unadventurous – it could surely pull in cheeses from other manufacturers to add variety. If these are simply the cheeses that Ilchester sells all year round as individual sticks, that makes it feel a bit unspecial. You could go to the supermarket or the cheese monger and create a more varied selection yourself, and yes, it wouldn’t have the nice box with the windows to open each day, but you know – a bit of invention could sort that out.

I’m a bit torn about this because I really, really like the idea and So Wrong It’s Nom seems to be a decent company run by someone with a genuine love of cheese. I don’t know if there was any way for them not to be in this situation, because maybe all the big commercial cheesemakers would be the same and doing this without the support and backing of a big company with distribution set up already would be a non-starter.  None of the cheeses are bad – each stick I’ve had so far has been a genuinely tasty treat and I can’t complain about the cheese quality. But getting Cheddar variations almost every day when you might also be having a Cheddar sandwich for lunch feels a bit lazy. Where’s the Stilton, the Wensleydale, the Gouda, the Brie, the exotic goat’s cheese and so on? I don’t want to get all Monty Python on this, but really, you could play the Cheese Shop sketch here, opening a window and guessing incorrectly and disappointedly at what exotic flavour might lie behind it (assuming that you hadn’t already looked at the list of cheeses on the inside cover of the box and listed all over the front and back cover- a bit of a spoiler for an advent calendar where surprise is surely all part of the fun.

I don’t feel ripped off – that would be going too far because the box hardly keeps what you can expect a secret, even if customers might not have paid much attention to such minor details when in a fog of cheese-induced excitement at the concept. I assume that most people are happy enough with these – that the whole novelty of it all compensates for the lack of variety. Perhaps I’m taking it all too seriously and should lighten up. But equally, I think the idea of this is something that still has not quite translated into execution. For me, there was a definite sense of ‘is that all there is?’ by day two and I doubt that I’ll be repeating this particular festive treat again next year unless there is a major overhaul.

DAVID FLINT

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