Step aside Sir Ken...
Russell Haggata is the Big Cheese at Morrisons – and that’s official!
The 43-year-old cheesemonger, from Skelmanthorpe, is the chief cheese taster at Morrisons and samples more than 1,800 cheeses a year.
Now he has joined the world’s leading cheese experts by being one of just a handful of people in the UK to be inducted into the Guild Internationale Des Fromagers, an illustrious community of cheese experts from 33 countries.
Cheese specialist Russell has been the guardian of quality at the Bradford-based retailer’s 492 stores for the last five years. Morrisons sells 316 different types of cheese, all of which have been tasted and approved by Russell himself.
He was nominated and approved after the supermarket picked up a massive 22 gold medals and won Cheddar Cheese Retailer of the Year at the world’s largest cheese show, the International Cheese Awards, this summer. All 22 cheeses were hand selected by Russell.
He studied cheese at college for three years and became expert in the science of how four main ingredients – milk, cultures, coagulant and salt – can be converted into hundreds of different types of cheese.
He said: “I have dedicated most of my life to cheese.”
