According to The Daily Telegraph, British dairy company Dairy Crest has granted a floating charge over the cheese – the firm’s leading Cheddar brand – to its pension fund trustees, Dairy Crest states in its official press release.
It means that in the unlikely event the firm goes burst, the trustees will become owners of 20,000 tonnes of cheese and can sell it. The total worth of cheese is £60 million (about $92 million).
The company, which has been caught in the middle of supermarket price wars and blockades by farmers in recent months, had a pension fund deficit of £84 million in September 2012. The pension fund will get a one-off cash contribution of £40 million, in addition to the floating charge over £60 million of maturing cheese.
Dairy Crest closed its final salary pension scheme, affecting some 3,000 members of its 5,000-strong staff. At the moment Dairy Crest has around £150 million worth of maturing cheese in the warehouse. Cheddar is a type of hard yellow cheese, it takes from several months to several years for the cheese to mature. Firm’s Cathedral City cheese brand is the most popular Cheddar brand in the United Kingdom. It matures for around 12 months before being sold.
Drinking group Diageo, Johnnie Walker producer, struck a similar deal in 2010, when it agreed to pour up to 2.5 million barrels of maturing whisky into its pension fund.
