France on guard against cheese burglars

Paris: Farmers in France are being driven crackers after thieves launched a string of raids to steal wheels of cheese.

With consumer demand high in the run-up to Christmas, criminal gangs have spotted a lucrative opportunity. More than four tons of Comte cheese, worth at least euros 40,000 (Dh157,797) were stolen last week from a renowned producer in eastern France near the Swiss border.

The burglars cut through a barbed wire fence at night to enter the Napiot dairy in Goux-les-Usiers and loaded a lorry with 100 90lb “wheels” of the cheese which the family has been making since 1860.

A police source said: “The newspapers are calling it a record theft, but there have been at least two other thefts of similar quantities of cheese in recent times. The cheesemakers decided not to make their misfortune public.”

Comte, a hard cheese made exclusively with the milk of Montbeliarde or French Simmental cows, has a distinctive nutty, slightly sweet flavour and retails for euros 10 to euros 40 per kg, making it just as valuable to thieves as some jewellery or electrical goods. The cheese has an Appellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC) certification as its quality is strictly monitored. Any substandard batch cannot be sold as Comte and must be labelled as the less distinguished Gruyere variety.

Police nicknamed the thieves the ‘meules’ or millstone gang — referring to the flat circular “wheels” in which Comte is produced. Claude Vermot-Desroches, head of the cheese’s trade body Comite Interprofessionnel de Gestion du Comte, said it is hard to sell the stolen cheese in normal retail situations so much of it disappears on to the black market. “Shops are obliged to keep documentation showing the provenance and quality of cheeses ... and certificates of sale,” Vermot-Desroches said. “There must be an illicit distribution network.”

Each “wheel’ has its producer’s mark embedded in the rind but Vermot-Desroches said market traders often cut Comte into wedges before displaying it, removing the maker’s label. Rising rural thefts have prompted farmers and cheesemakers to install CCTV cameras and motion sensors and to set up “surveillance networks”. Xavier Beulin, head of France’s largest farmers’ union the FNSEA, said: “In recent years the threat has been from highly-organised criminal networks.”

— The Daily Telegraph