How Matthew Hall raised Butlers from the ashes

On a cold November night last year, Matthew Hall watched his livelihood burn to the ground. He had woken earlier to the sound of his mother throwing rocks at his window and saw “in her eyes” that it was serious.

They drove to the family farm in rural Lancashire, home of Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses, of which Hall is the fourth-generation owner. There, his legs turned “instantly to jelly babies”, he says. “I can’t describe the smell that lingers heavy in the air from something like that. It’s horrible.”

The blaze – for which there is still no explanation – was devastating. A warehouse the size of two football pitches was destroyed; hundreds of tonnes of cheese were lost. A day earlier, the Butlers factory had been preparing Christmas orders for customers including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and M&S. By morning, the business, established by Hall’s great-grandparents almost a century ago, was little more than ashes and rubble.

Speaking eight months later, the emotion from that night is still apparent in Hall. But so too is the family resilience and passion that have rescued Butlers from the brink. Already, the dairy is back on its feet.

Plans for the rescue mission were already in motion before first light after the night of the fire. Hall and his brother Dan, who run the business with their mum Gill as chair and “guardian of great cheese”, quickly realised what they had to do. “It was the mindset of, ‘in a few hours’ time we’ve got farmers sending us milk,” he says. “So, we’ve got to turn milk to cheese.”

That’s not easy, though, when you’ve no factory and no income, and customers are on the phone asking where their cheese is. Not to mention a team of staff fearful for their future. “There was a lot of upset in the air, a lot of disbelief, a lot of confusion,” Hall adds. “We were doing a lot of reassurance.

“We made clear very quickly that whatever happened, we would pay staff, we would pay farmers. We had no idea where the money would come from, but we knew we had to achieve it.”

The next job was finding somewhere they could continue making cheese. The only option was to construct a building on a site six miles away. “We built it in six weeks in the Lancashire winter – every day apart from Christmas,” Hall says, with pride.

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‘It’s messy, but no one cares’

From the outside it’s easy to see nothing but positives since the fire. Butlers’ signature Blacksticks range returned to supermarkets in February, value sales have reached 60% of pre-fire levels, and the business has become the largest independent maker of soft cheese in the UK after buying Hampshire Cheese Co.

But on the inside, the reality feels very different. As might be expected, a crisis facility thrown up so quickly was not without problems. In one instance, a power cut meant a Land Rover had to be used to jump-start the site’s generator for a day. “It’s messy, but no one cares,” Hall says. “As a retailer, you just need your order out the door.”

That’s just a fraction of the day-to-day struggles the Butlers team faces as it produces cheese in a space a tenth of the size of the original factory. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out how complicated and time-consuming that’s going to be,” he adds.

“You’re cutting things by hand. You’re moving things around a gazillion times a day to try and create space. It’s not sexy, it just is what it is. And it’s going to be that way for a little while.”

The work can be a punishing. Hall describes it as “like running a marathon in clogs and getting a PB at the same time. It’s a lot of hard yards, a lot of midnight oil, a lot of grit and determination and just a real quiet dedication to our craft.”