Wyke Farms.

In 2004, Wyke Farms was a national cheddar maker, much of it white label for the supermarkets, and it had lost some of its listings. The way back was one product with one listing, in Asda: Leskol, a reduced-fat, cheddar-style alternative Rich Clothier had created for his father, who'd been told to cut back on cheddar. It had to work first time.

The big cheddar brands were built by manufacturers, not farmers. The biggest, Cathedral City, is made in Cornwall by a multinational dairy group. They sold consistency and familiarity. None of them could tell a family farming story from Somerset, the home of cheddar.

Somerset farming since 1861.

The product truth was hiding in plain sight: a family that had farmed Somerset for generations, still making cheddar to grandmother Ivy's original recipe. The proposition: we'll never change the recipe, made by our family for yours.

To get back on the shelf, the first product couldn't even carry the family name. And once it could, the promise took options away for good: no reformulating to hit a price, no chasing trends, no changing the recipe. A manufactured brand can do all of those. Wyke gave them up.

Leskol did well enough that Asda gave Wyke the chance to list again, under its own name. From outside the top ten, Wyke became the fastest growing cheddar brand in the UK, and by 2007 the fourth largest, the only independent in the top ten. Today it's the UK's largest independent cheese producer, making 18,000 tonnes of cheddar a year for more than 160 countries. Twenty-two years on, it still leads with Somerset and the family recipe.