Mark on Charlotte Charlotte is the brand manager, and my role is cheese quality manager, grading and selecting every batch of Cathedral City cheese. Any cheese being developed involves me. I'm an operations person and we have a different view to the marketers, like Charlotte. I see what's right and what's wrong in cheese as black and white - if there's a lot of cheese to get through, I have to be very focused. There are lots of enthusiastic amateurs in cheese tasting, and Charlotte's no exception - if I fancy an argument about cheese tasting, I'll call her up! That said, I think she was quietly impressed with the Lighter product. She's not an easy person to get hold of - it's easier to get an audience with the Pope. In fact it doesn't help that I work in the south west of England, while she's in Surrey and is in meetings a lot. I've learnt from Charlotte that I don't have a career in marketing and I don't enjoy meetings as much as she does! But I now have a good understanding of the depth of work involved in making a new cheese a reality. Charlotte on Mark I started as Cathedral City brand manager just as Dairy Crest was planning the launch of the new Lighter variety of the cheese. The tasting side of that was very frequent as we got to know the manufacturing process and saw how the cheese matured. That's when I began working with Mark, as head of the cheese quality team. My first impression of him was that he was really tall, and he's very confident in his tasting abilities. But he's always interested in getting other people's perspectives and he's not afraid of a challenge to his views. I saw him every month for about a year in meetings that brought together teams from across the business who were involved in launching the product. Besides tasting, Mark helped me to understand the complexity of managing cheese stocks. Now Cathedral City Lighter is finally out there we'll carry on meeting regularly because I manage the whole Cathedral City family.

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