Name: Chris Davies

Business name: Weird and Wonderful Cheese Company

Opening times: Oswestry Market from 9am to 3pm on Wednesday and some Saturdays. Llanfyllin Market on Thursdays.

When did you open your business and why?

We STARTED about five years ago – it was me and a friend of mine. He was working at his own company at the time and we started making cheese ourselves.

Myself and Guy Dimelow were making and selling the cheese from his company, but he slowly started venturing into another career, so I decided to carry on with the cheese.

I bought the rest of Guy’s stock off him and was continuing to make cheese.

From that we’ve started the Weird and Wonderful Cheese Company.

We’re making lots of different flavoured cheeses, but not as many of our own now because we stock Belton Farm Cheese.

Why in this location?

We STILL have a unit down in Malpas, and when I started I was going everywhere doing markets, but slowly we had people coming onboard to help and do the markets of their own.

Because I couldn’t fill the markets by myself, we now have people who go out to them separately.

It’s good for them because they buy the stock from us and have their own markets then, allowing them to decide when and where they work.

We attend markets in Oswestry, Llanfyllin, Shrewsbury, Whitchurch and other places.

Now and then we all join forces if we’re doing a big event together.

Tell us about your business

The ‘Weird and Wonderful’ title speaks for itself – we do a lot of different cheeses.

We have curry cheddar for example, at Christmas time we do chocolate orange cheese and Christmas pudding cheese.

We offer three different chilli cheeses including the hottest cheese in the country.

A lot of the cheeses we sell are just something different to what you would usually see on a supermarket shelf for example.

We also do the wonderful cheeses, including the Shropshire Blue or Blue Stilton which we get from Webster’s in Leicestershire.

It’s nice travelling to different areas and everywhere you go people like it.

Luckily we’re not far from Belton Farm whose cheese we stock, and all their cheeses are award-winning so it’s nice to have their name alongside our brand.

I think it’s important to source our cheeses locally, especially when we’re taking them across the country for markets.

What is your proudest moment?

Seeing the business grow and being able to support my family through the business is great.

We’ve been on the television and radio and featured on Bargain Hunt in the past, that’s nice.

But the main thing I think is seeing the business becoming a success after starting it from nothing.

Any strange requests?

We HAVE a lot of requests for weird cheeses, but not many stand out because we specialise in that.