Why so many cheese heists? As B.C. cops foil another, here’s why cheese is so valuable

Some of the recent heists have been sophisticated, risky, lucrative.

They have grabbed our attention, sparked our sympathy, and riled our imaginations. Maybe it’s because we love a decent crime story — whether the would-be thieves are thwarted, or make off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen goods.

Or maybe it’s just the fact that what they’re stealing is cheese. Luxury cheese, in fact.

On Thursday, B.C. RCMP revealed they’d recently foiled an attempted cheese heist at a Whole Foods in North Vancouver. They’d been on patrol Sept. 29 when they found a cart full of cheese outside the grocery store. A suspect fled on foot, leaving $12,800 worth of cheese behind.

This most recent attempted heist comes as the cheese world is still reeling after a U.K. cheese heist that saw con artists make off with more than £300,000 (or more than $540,000 Cdn) in clothbound, award-winning cheddar. A 63-year-old man was recently arrested and released on bail. 

The cheese — 950 wheels of cheddar weighing 22 tonnes, stolen from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London — has not been recovered.

But why cheese, of all things?

“We suspect cheese to be the target due to its high resale value on the black market,” a spokesperson from North Vancouver RCMP Media Relations told CBC News in email statement.

As soon as a product goes up in price significantly over a short period, like cheese has, you will attract the attention of organized crime, explained Prof. Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab.

“You won’t steal kilos and kilos of a product unless you know who you’re going to sell it to. We are clearly dealing with organized groups here that are basically finding new markets.”

The cheese black market

According to Statistics Canada, the monthly average retail price of a 500 gram block of cheese in Canada has gone up from $5.92 in September 2019 to $6.86 in September 2024 — a 16 per cent price increase.

But the prices get steeper as the cheeses get fancier. At Loblaws, 280 grams of Balderson Old Cheddar costs $10.49. If you want some Bothwell smoked Gouda, it will cost you $17.27 for 540 grams at Walmart. And 200 grams of Tre Stelle Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese goes for $13.29 at Metro.

Meanwhile, a new report on Canada’s cheese market by analytics company ResearchAndMarkets.com says “the Canadian cheese industry is experiencing a significant upswing,” and predicts the market will be worth more than $5 billion by 2028.

Yes, cheese is expensive, but it hasn’t increased more dramatically than other food items in Canada, said Michael von Massow, a professor of food agriculture and resource economics at the University of Guelph. What makes it such a target for thieves, he suspects, is “an underground way of expanding margins” and reducing input costs for small business like restaurants, bakeries and convenience stores.

In other words, the thieves likely have buyers lined up.

“It is something that you have to turn over fairly quickly, and likely, because it’s black market … selling it at a discount,” von Massow said.

Cheese, like butter — also a common target for thieves — is also more easily re-purposed and more difficult to trace than some other stolen items because it’s an ingredient rather than an end good, he added.

“Once it’s in the kitchen, it disappears. It changes form. There’s no serial number and it’s difficult to say where it came from, especially once it’s been transformed.”

Hot cheese

The annual global cost of illicit trade and fraud in the food sector is estimated between $30 billion and $50 billion US, according to a recent report by the World Trade Organization.  And according to the U.K.’s Centre for Retail Research, in the earlier 2000s, cheese was the most-stolen product in the U.K. and Europe.

In 2022, thieves stole 161 wheels of cheese worth about $32,000 Cdn from a Dutch cheese farmer, according to the New York Times. Dairy farms in the Netherlands are frequently targeted, with the website Dutch News reporting in 2016 that 8,500 kilograms of Dutch cheese was stolen in the previous year, worth about $135,000.

WATCH | Ontario’s butter heists: 

Ontario butter thieves strike again with ‘large-scale’ robberies

Police in Guelph, Ont., say there have been seven ‘large-scale’ butter thefts over the last 10 months, including two in October. The most recent cases resulted in losses of more than $900 each.

Italy is also often a target for Parmigiano Reggiano thieves. In 2016, CBS reported that about $9.7 million worth of the hard Italian cheese had been stolen in the past two years.

The U.S. isn’t immune, with 20,000 pounds of fresh Wisconsin cheese worth about $64,000 nabbed by “cheese bandits” in 2016. And in Canada, thieves made off with $187,000 worth of cheese from Saputo Dairy Products in Tavistock, Ont., in 2019.

In 2022, cheese was the second-most stolen grocery store item in Canada, following meat, according to the Canadian Press.

In the U.K., where thieves recently made off with $540,000 of award-winning cheddar, experts say cost is to blame.

“The retail price of cheddar increased by 6.5 per cent up to May 2024,” Patrick McGuigan, a specialist in the dairy sector, told BBC News last week. “This is why we’re seeing security tags on blocks of cheddar in supermarkets. Based on price alone, cheese is one of the most desirable foods a criminal can steal.”

Investigation ongoing

In its Thursday news release about the foiled cheese heist at Whole Foods, the North Vancouver RCMP noted they were able to stop the theft because they were “proactively patrolling high-crime areas to prevent and deter crime from occurring.”

“We often conduct proactive patrols around retail hubs like the location where the North Vancouver Whole Foods is situated,” they elaborated in their statement to CBC News, while adding their investigation is ongoing and they will be exploring “all possible investigative avenues.”

But some people on X, formerly Twitter, had their own theories about why the thief went for high-end cheese, which they shared on the RCMP’s post.

“Charcuterie is expensive,” wrote X user Tiffany Trownson.

“True, quality charcuterie isn’t cheap—but neither are the consequences of stealing it!,” responded the RCMP.