Betsy Everett meets David Hartley, managing director of Wensleydale Creamery

IT MIGHT be tempting to call the man who runs the Wensleydale Creamery a big cheese if an internet trawl didn’t reveal that, surprise, surprise, it is hardly an original thought.

But there’s another reason not to: David Hartley, managing director of the cheesemaking company in Hawes, doesn’t fit the stereotype the term implies. He has, as they say in Yorkshire, no side. He doesn’t strut and posture and he doesn’t give himself airs.

He does, however, talk 19 to the dozen and expect you to keep up, which proves difficult when you’re not familiar with business-speak: the predictive text as I type doesn’t help, rendering the business philosophy he espouses as: “Profit is the sovereign criterion of the terrorist.”

(I have to look that one up afterwards: for terrorist read “enterprise”.) “It means we can’t survive without making money,” he explains helpfully. “We’re a small, independent company but we are up against the big multi-nationals. We have a turnover of £25 million a year. Dairy Crest’s is £1.2 billion and the Irish Dairy Board’s is £3 billion. The cheese market overall is worth £2.6 billion. Wensleydale has a tiny share of that, about £13 million.” David and Goliath is looking like a better analogy.

He’s using the figures not just to put the size of the multi-award winning operation into perspective but also to dispel any notion that he doesn’t understand the problems of the 41 small Dales farmers who supply the 23 million litres (40.5 million pints) of milk used every year by the creamery.

“We know what they’re up against. We had one of the worst summers on record last year and milk production was down 14 per cent.

This year it’s down eight per cent. We understand issues of size and scale because we are small, too, and we’re selling to an international market, and nobody is going to pay for our inefficiency.

But there’s no point focussing on the lousy weather when you can do nothing about it; we have to look for different ways to grow, expand, develop, and make a profit.”

And that, despite a doubledip recession, global economic uncertainty, a general lack of gleeful optimism in the land, to say nothing of all of us demanding cheap food, is precisely what’s happening.

In January, a year after getting the go-ahead from the planners – the Yorkshire Dales National Park – work will start on the first phase of a major redevelopment of the Hawes site. It will see all the cheese production concentrated there, with the blending (adding the cranberries, the ginger, the apricots and all the other tasty bits), packing and dispatching at the company’s Kirkby Malzeard site.

“The first phase is to get all cheese making from two sites into one new building and the second is removal of the old building and redevelopment of the site. It’s a heritage product, rooted in history, but we need a 21st century operation. That’s the challenge,” he says.

David and his team have recently spent the best part of a week talking to the dairy farmers, explaining the business plan and listening to their questions and concerns.

“This time last year when we were all up to our necks in flood water it was so much worse. Now we really have something to look forward to. We’re committed to spending £3-4m on this project, and let’s face it we could do it much cheaper if we just moved the whole operation to a trading estate in Leeming Bar. But Hawes is the spiritual home of Wensleydale cheese. It’s a fantastic location and it represents everything that Yorkshire Wensleydale cheese stands for.”

With phase two will come a state-of-the-art building with – well, a sort of rock on top.

It’s what architects call an erratic. One planner, seeing the finished design, didn’t rock the rock. “I’m quite delighted that the erratic design feature has disappeared,”

she’s quoted as saying. Well, it hasn’t. In the end the committee approved it and if the architect’s drawings are anything to go by it looks pretty good.

There are lots of special dates being marked this year: the creamery is 60 years old, the new business that was formed in a management buy-out in 1992 is 21, David himself is 50 – and Yorkshire Country Cricket Club, with whom they have just signed a three-year sponsorship deal, to his obvious delight, is 150.