A trip to the Mornington Peninsula isn’t complete without picking up an order of vegan cheese from of The Vegan Dairy. Here, The Vegan Dairy is creating some of the best vegan cheeses, butters and cremes that Australia has to offer. Plus, they’re located in one of Victoria’s most visited tourist regions. So, how does a couple end up on The Mornington Peninsula making and selling vegan cheese across the country? The Vegan Dairy’s founders Brittany and Bronson Bertschinger share their story about how vegan cheese paved the way for them to turn a hobby into a fully -fledged business and a highly sought-after vegan product range.
Brittany and Bronson, The Vegan Dairy started because you wanted a vegan version of Persian feta. Tell me about your experience of making that first batch of feta and how you expanded into a fully-fledged vegan business?
“I guess it didn’t really start because Bronson wanted vegan feta. Rather, it was more that I tried making a vegan feta for Bronson when he stopped eating dairy. At the time, I was working in my mum’s dairy cheese-making business and bringing home lots of dairy cheese which was starting to have negative health implications.
I had learned so much about cheese-making from my mum and thought I would give it a go, and tried to make something for Bronson to have at home. The vegan cheese options that were available in the stores were pretty terrible at the time. I made about 13 different batches and variations until I found something we really liked.
I really just made it for us to have at home, but my mum asked if she could take it to her markets for her lactose-intolerant or vegan customers and people loved it! We began very much by accident and very organically. I started making a few jars just for fun for markets. Then people started asking for more. A few shops started ringing asking about the Persian Feta their customer had recommended to them. It really was a very happy accidental journey!”
How long have you both been vegan for? What made you decide to go vegan?
Bronson has been vegetarian for about 20 years and me about 10 years. Neither of us ate eggs as vegetarians, so were vegan plus dairy, I suppose. Dairy was the last thing to go, and it started because of how the copious amounts of dairy I was bringing home made us feel. We felt the impact it has on human health and so it was just a natural ‘switch’ from there.”
Do you have prior experience as cheese-makers? Why cheese?
“Yep, by chance really! My mum had a dairy cheese business that focused on beautiful high-end French cheeses. Her business got too busy for her and it so happened I was looking to move back to Melbourne at the time (I had lived interstate for a few years); I went to work with her in her business. I learned so much about the techniques and history of cheese-making, and of course in such a personal way being not only a small artisan-made business but also my mum. Mum is a chef by trade and has always worked in food, so all ‘food’ comes naturally. After we lost my youngest brother in an accident in 2010, mum busied herself with courses and workshops trying to cope with her grief. One of those was cheese-making, and she felt a real connection with it straight away because of my brother loved cheese. It was a very natural and accidental journey for her as well to come into ‘cheese’ in the beginning, and then very natural and accidental for me to fall into it and evolve into vegan cheese-making from there.”
Brittany and Bronson, you are the co-founders of The Vegan Dairy and you’re married to one another. How do you keep your business going as well as keeping your marriage alive and well?
“Haha! This is the ultimate question, isn’t it! There is no secret I am sorry to say. It is really hard at times and everyone we know thinks we are nuts, basically. So do we most of the time! But we do our best to be patient with each other to try to make it work.
Bronson is actually a body-worker and that is something he has always kept up, but his creative side just fits so well into The Vegan Dairy’s growth that he sort of just fell into the business with me. We can say it is probably not forever, working together! We know that we have our limits, and we know the time will come that we can no longer push them any further. We also home-school our kids, and do most of our work from home, so we are both home, together, in each other’s faces every day. We both know it is a recipe for disaster in theory. But with our focus being to bring healthy vegan food to as many mouths as possible, we try to focus on those really nice goals when times get ‘tough’. We try to communicate (not always successfully) when there is friction to move past those times of frustration. I can’t say I would recommend running a business with your other half (haha!), especially if your ‘roles’ in the business cross over as much as ours do. But we have managed to find ways to keep at it over the last few years. We will just see how things go!
We know that the key – when working together – is to separate your roles or jobs as much as possible and to not talk about work when you ‘come home’. So far, we have failed miserably at both of those things and are still working on them every darn day (haha)! I would love to hear from a business run by a married couple who have done this successfully! Teach me all that you do!”
The Vegan Dairy is also committed to ‘leaving smaller footprints’ e.g. using compostable packaging. How does your business achieve this successfully?
“I personally feel very strongly about reducing our environmental footprint in every way possible. Sometimes we can’t always achieve this, but we are constantly working towards improving everything we do all the time. It took me nearly four years to find a supplier for compostable packaging. I was so stubborn about not wanting to package in plastic that we nearly lost our business, actually. Bronson very wisely gave me a reality check and told me that bringing beautiful vegan products to people, helping people transition away from the environmental detriment of dairy, was a huge achievement towards caring for the planet. So in order to continue doing that, I had to ‘do what I had to do’ until I found a better way. That is, I suppose, the attitude we have in our business now. We compost all our food waste on site at work. We use compostable packaging wherever possible, or where it is jars/containers we use jars that can be not just recycled but also repurposed (our mason jars have so many uses after the product has been consumed).
We encourage our staff to reduce their single-use plastic consumption in their own lives, but in particular in the workplace with their lunches, etc. We buy from local suppliers where possible, and always from ethical suppliers who give back to their communities (typically these sorts of businesses share our values in reducing their environmental footprint). We have a separate service (which took a while to find) to recycle any soft plastic that comes through our doors rather than putting it into landfill. We recycle all other materials to avoid ‘landfill’ waste at every opportunity. We accept used jars back to our facility to be re-sterilised and reused in production, to further reduce packaging waste going into the system. We hope to work towards ‘zero waste’ as time goes on and are proud of where we have come to so far, but are also always working on being ‘better’ as a team.”
The Vegan Dairy product range includes vegan cheeses, butters and crèmes. To make your products, you source your ingredients locally. Your business is located on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. Is it hard to source ingredients locally?
“In terms of being on the Mornington Peninsula, this doesn’t tend to impact our ability to source ingredients. We are pretty close to Melbourne, so access isn’t really an issue. Not all of our ingredients are sourced locally though, unfortunately. That is our ultimate goal and we do so wherever possible but two of our key ingredients – cashews and coconut oil for example – are simply not grown in sufficient quantities in Australia to be sourced here. We just don’t have enough of a tropical climate in Australia for this.
We are often criticised for not having a higher ‘made in Australia from local ingredients’ percentage on our labelling, but sadly the reality of where cashews and coconut oil are produced just makes this impossible. Though, we do ensure our suppliers for these overseas ingredients are ethical in all their processes (including their source of labour) and also work with suppliers who give back to their local communities. Kokonut Pacific, where we source our coconut oil, is a beautiful example of this.”
You also use traditional cheese-making techniques. How do you achieve this from a vegan perspective?
“A lot of trial and error! I have always used what I learned working with my mum and applied this to vegan ingredients. Mainly because this is what I know, but also because I feel this is what would give the most authentic result. We use a base of plant-based ingredients to simulate the texture and nutritional profile of a dairy milk base that might be used in dairy cheese. We obtain our taste profile from culturing our products naturally over controlled periods of time rather than adding vinegars or other flavours. For some of our products, we age and air-dry the way I was taught in traditional cheese-making. It has certainly been a huge learning curve, and I have had heaps of failures. But for me, that was always the fun of the process! Discovering new things, learning as I went.
Success feels like such a huge achievement after countless fails! We are still always learning, and the industry is so young that new ingredients and products and cultures and moulds and other ‘inputs’ are being developed for vegan applications all the time. It is a very exciting industry to be a part of, if you like trial and error and being forced to develop nearly everything from scratch without much existing experience to draw from!”
Your website says that you’re working on changing your butters and crémes (and developing new cheeses) to be made of organic hemp rather than organic cashews. There seems to be a growing interest from companies wanting to use hemp as an alternative ingredient. Why are you deciding to use hemp?
“It began, more so, as a process to hopefully eliminate nuts over time. There is an increase in nut allergies in the plant-based world at the moment, possibly because of all the products made from them and so we are getting so many more nuts in our diets than we are used to. So we are working on ways to be ‘allergen free’ so that there is no barrier for anyone to try our products. Hemp is a beautiful ingredient, and has a really great nutritional profile for cheese-making and for health! It is also an ingredient that is grown a lot in Australia, so sourcing this locally is much easier than with cashews for example.
We are working with other ingredients at the moment as well, not just hemp. But we have loved the process of developing our Hemp Mozzarella and been so excited at the amazing response we have had from this. Our butters were able to work beautifully with hemp as well, and so we made that transition once we were happy that the ‘outcome’ using hemp was as good as the original. Like everything for us, we balance health, environment, and ethics when choosing what to use in our products. Hemp is an incredible plant that really ticks all those boxes!”
Non-vegans say they couldn’t go vegan because they love their cheese too much. What would you say to that, and which of your products would convince them otherwise?
“This is the comment I hear the most! It always amuses me as many people don’t know that when you eat dairy cheese you actually get an endorphin release in the brain. So dairy cheese – literally, chemically and hormonally – makes you feel good. It is delicious, but the thing that really gets people attached to dairy is the check cal reaction happening in their body that most people are unaware of. So I usually explain this to people, and we have a laugh. Then, I offer them vegan options and ask them to just think about taste purely rather than the subconscious emotional connection many people have to dairy.
I also think a lot of people have only ever tried ‘mass produced’ vegan cheeses and this is probably an unfair introduction to the vegan cheese world. There is an incredible variety of beautifully made vegan cheese these days, and I am honestly yet to find someone who truly did not like any of our products at all. Most people are pleasantly surprised! They might not give up dairy in favour of our products on the spot, but that is ok! We are all on a journey, and for us the main and nicest thing is just to show people that delicious, healthy alternatives do exist now. We are not here to tell anyone how to live their lives or what decisions to make. But if we can show people that we have options that they actually really enjoy eating, then this can be the little seed we plant for a journey that may progress for that person.
Our specific products? Our butter is a crowd-pleaser for just about everyone so for anyone wanting to try a dairy alternative don’t buy a margarine! They are simply incomparable to dairy and we have formulated our butter to be much richer, like a dairy butter. Our cheeses? The Aged and Smokey and the Persian Feta are the two that most people will continue to come back to. I would say perhaps the most similar in flavour profile to their dairy counterparts, and almost everyone that I have spoken to is surprised and shocked at how much they enjoy our Hemp Mozzarella (they usually expect it to melt like crap and taste fake). This is all of course dependent on individual people’s flavour preferences. Our Herb and Garlic, Dill Chèvre, and Red Bell Pepper cheeses are all nearly equally as popular. For the sweet tooth – our Dutch Chocolate Creme is just a no brainer and I am yet to come across someone who didn’t like it.”
Once a month, The Vegan Dairy was holding a vegan makers market in the carpark at The Vegan Dairy. Why did you decide to do this? Are there many vegan makers on the Mornington Peninsula?
“We started it in the beginning just to ‘support local’, to get to know our customers, and to spend some time with other local makers and our customers in a really fun and relaxed way. Given that we mostly supply other stores, our customers rarely got the chance to come and see us and our factory, and we wanted to open up our factory doors once a month to connect with our little community. Of course that was all pre-COVID and before all the restrictions and ‘changes in life’ that have happened.
Since then, it has completely changed the way the Open Days feel unfortunately. At the moment we are no longer running them. The ‘rules’ have made it very un-relaxed, and in the time that we had lockdowns many of our customers have found other ways to source our products. So the turn-out is not as good anymore as it used to be. When we have the opportunity to get a group of other local makers together, we will absolutely love holding them again! There are so many incredible Melbourne and Peninsula vegan businesses coming out at the moment and we love meeting them all and helping to introduce a community to them that we have been so grateful for in our own business. I think there are many ‘vegan makers’ everywhere. Most just don’t get the chance to be seen which is why we loved holding these Open Days so much. But as life goes, things change and you find ways to adapt and find alternatives to achieve the same outcome. Hopefully one day they will be regular every month again! I can’t wait for that day.”
Check out The Vegan Dairy at their website and you can order items from their online store. You can also sign up to The Vegan Dairy’s newsletter and you’ll receive a free mini e-book about The Vegan Dairy’s cheeses and easy recipes to make at home. Or, find your local stockist using The Vegan Dairy’s store locator.
