Lily Reade
Isle of Mull Cheese
Now living in Ayrshire, I worked in the family business, Isle of Mull Cheese, in various ways until I went to study Rural Business Management at SRUC in Aberdeen, returning to the business running our cafe for a few years before moving to Edinburgh for 3 years, and now in the Southwest living with my partner on his farm.
Growing up on the Isle of Mull, tourism has been all around me my whole life. We’ve always had tourists in one form or another, whether that was visiting our farm shop or cafe, taking a tour, staying in holiday lets or pop-up evening dinner events, I’ve been involved in various activities. I now work for SAC Consulting as a Project Manager, primarily on the Farm Advisory Service Programme and while I don’t live on Mull anymore, I remain as active as I can in the family business.
Mull has a generous footfall of tourists, and while the summer remains heavily tourist centred, since the covid years we have also seen the winters becoming more popular. Our primary business is cheesemaking, using milk from our own cows, we have also recently built a distillery, to turn whey from our cheesemaking, into alcohol, adding another element to the tourist activity, undertaking cheese & drinks tastings as well as distillery tours.