Three generations of passion, pasture, and patience
Giuseppe Puzz arrived in Hawes, Wensleydale, with little more than a notebook of family recipes and a determination to make cheese worthy of his Piedmontese heritage. Yorkshire farmers were sceptical at first — an Italian in the Dales was a rare sight — but Giuseppe's first batch of Wensleydale won over the village within a season.
He rented a stone outbuilding behind the village dairy and worked alone through harsh winters, ladling curds by candlelight and turning wheels on rough-hewn shelves. By 1931, Aldo Puzz, his eldest son, had joined the operation and the Puzz name was stamped on wheels shipped to markets as far south as York.
After the Second World War, Aldo modernised the creamery without abandoning tradition. He installed temperature-controlled ageing rooms carved into a limestone hillside, maintaining the cool, humid conditions that blue cheeses demand. The Heritage Blue recipe — still our bestseller today — was perfected during this period through hundreds of small-batch experiments.
Aldo's wife Margaret introduced the smoked cheddar that would become a Norwich favourite decades later. She insisted on cold-smoking rather than hot-smoking, preserving the cheese's moisture while layering in deep, oak-driven flavour.
Elena Puzz, Aldo's granddaughter, grew up in the creamery. She studied food science at Reading University before returning to Hawes to learn affinage from her grandfather. In 2018, recognising a gap in East Anglia's artisan cheese scene, she opened the Market Place shop in Norwich.
The shop's cellar was converted from a Victorian wine store, its brick arches now home to hundreds of ageing wheels. Elena splits her time between Norwich and the Yorkshire creamery, ensuring every batch meets the family's exacting standards.
Our Heritage Blue received a Gold Medal at the 2024 British Cheese Awards. The Norwich shop was named Best Independent Food Retailer in the 2025 Norfolk Food & Drink Awards. Elena was profiled in Country Life magazine's "Women Shaping British Food" feature.
These honours matter to us not as trophies but as confirmation that slow, careful work still has a place in modern British food culture.
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