The 5 Biggest Cheese Heists of All Time
This article is part of our Cocktail Chatter series, where we dive into the wild, weird, and wondrous corners of history to share over a cocktail and impress your friends.
The word “heist” usually conjures images of orchestrated bank thefts, precious gems going missing in the night, and people in ski masks plucking art off museum walls. But somebody hijacking a semi truck filled with several tons of gouda? Probably not so much.
And yet, some thieves have changed up their go-to targets, setting their sights instead on fancy cheese. We’re not endorsing theft, but stealing high-end food products arguably makes just as much sense as going after the more traditional, non-digestable targets. After all, cheese can be very expensive, and it’s easier to liquidate than any one-of-a-kind jewel or Van Gogh painting.
According to a 2011 survey performed by Britain’s Center for Retail Research, 4 percent of the world’s cheese supply goes missing annually, making it the most stolen food item on the planet. It’s not all petty shoplifting. Since the survey data was first published, a number of large-scale cheese heists have made headlines across the globe, many of which remain unsolved.
Here, we’ll dive into the stories behind five of the biggest cheese thefts to date, in order from least to most lucrative.
The Comté Caper
Comté is an AOC-protected cheese that comes from the Franche-Comté region in eastern France where this heist took place in 2015. One November night, a team of bandits slid into the Napier dairy in the town of Goux-les-Usiers, cutting through a barbed wire fence and breaking into a cheese storage facility with a crowbar. The next morning, over 100 wheels — roughly 8,000 pounds — of Comté were reported missing. At the time, it was estimated that the haul had a market value of about $155,000. Sadly, the cheese was never recovered and the culprits remain at large.
The Vanishing Cheese Chariot
Early one August morning in 2019, a man strolled into Saputo Dairy Products in Tavistock, Ontario, with paperwork in hand, requesting a rather large quantity of cheese for an alleged delivery bound for the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The workers at Saputo Dairy loaded the shipment onto a blue transport truck, and the man drove off, never to be heard from again. It wasn’t until four days later that the company discovered that the delivery never made it to its intended destination. The folks at Saputo contacted the police, but they were never able to track down the man responsible for the heist or the stolen cheese. While the police never disclosed the specific variety or brand of the missing product, the load reportedly carried a market value of $187,000.
The Dark Side of the Cheddar Curtain
Wisconsin was hit with not one, not two, but three substantial cheese thefts in 2016. However, this case from a few years prior tops them all. In early 2013, 34-year-old Veniamin Balika showed up at Cashton, Wis.’s Pasture Pride Cheese with forged paperwork and tricked the owner into loading up his truck with 21 tons of Muenster cheese, reportedly valued at $200,000. After securing the loot, Balika made his way to New Jersey and allegedly tried to sell the cheese at a Bergen County rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Unfortunately for him, the police were already on his tail, and he was promptly arrested at the scene.
The Hafod Cheddar Heist
The most recent heist on this list also happens to be one of the most lucrative. In July 2024, a buyer claiming to work for a French supermarket chain sent an email to Patrick Holden, the dairy farmer at Wales’ Holden Farm Dairy, requesting 22 tons of the dairy’s coveted Hafod cheddar.
“It was the biggest order for our cheese we’ve ever received,” Holden told BBC. “Because it was from France, I thought, ‘finally, people on the continent are appreciating what we do.’”
Holden didn’t have nearly enough cheddar to fulfill the order, so he got two dairy farms from Somerset, England in on the deal that collectively made up the remaining 20 tons of cheddar. The whole order — valued at roughly $389,000 — eventually made its way to London-based wholesaler Neal’s Yard Dairy where it was picked up by a courier on Oct. 14. And then, it vanished without a trace.
Later that month, a London man was arrested and questioned about the heist, but he was later released on bail. As of now, the cheese has yet to be found and no further arrests have been made.
When Parma Got Plundered
While most cheese heists are accomplished in one fell swoop, this one was an ongoing affair that lasted almost two years.
In September 2015, an armed gang of 11 thieves was apprehended in the city of Modena in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region for stealing roughly $875,000-worth of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Reportedly, the bandits stole 2,039 wheels of precious Parm during their spree, breaking into warehouses and factories throughout Italy’s Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions. During the investigation, police found an array of complex tools used by the criminals for their illicit exploits, including radios, weapons, and electronics for bypassing alarm systems.
*Image retrieved from Africa Studio via stock.adobe.com
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