Coronavirus Statement

16 Mar 2020

Like many businesses we have been putting measures in place over the past few days to protect our staff and customers from the risks associated with coronavirus. 

Minimising Customer Contact

Currently our sales are by phone and through our website, which minimises face-to-face contact between ourselves and our customers. The fact that we are such a small business also means that we can ensure that only one member of staff is in the packing room each day which will further minimise risk.

NHS Advice

We are regularly checking the latest government advice to ensure we’re operating safely. The official NHS advice states that it is ‘very unlikely’ that the virus can be spread through packages or food. You can see the detailed guidance here. We have put our own measures in place to ensure that the already low risk is kept to an absolute minimum.

Delivery

We use APC overnight couriers to deliver our cheese boxes. APC have adopted a ‘no contact’ policy, so there is no direct contact with customers at the point of delivery, to ensure the safety of both the recipients and the drivers.

Hygiene

At this time, we want to reassure you that we already have extremely rigorous hygiene practises in place. These practises have helped us to achieve a 5* food hygiene rating at our last inspection. We also paid for a specialist company to carry out a hygiene audit a few months ago, to ensure that we were keeping up with best practise. Regular and thorough hand-washing has always been integral to our packing processes and naturally, given the current situation, our hand-washing and surface cleansing have now been further increased.

Social Distancing Within The Workplace

We have taken various additional steps to protect customers and staff, including closing our packing room and offices to everyone other than individual members of staff; creating isolated work-spaces to minimise contact between staff on site; changing the way we receive incoming stock to ensure no incoming packaging enters our cheese room; storing all incoming stock in a separate fridge for a period of time before moving it into our main fridges and making it available to send out to customers. We will continue to take advice from the Food Standards Agency and other authorities to ensure we’re keeping up with best practise.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for continuing to shop with us, and would encourage all of our customers to do everything they can to maintain their support for small independent businesses over the next few months.