Cheese With a Conscience and The Alice Shopland Angel Food Story

In an age when plant-based is being polished and commodified by the big boys, it’s worth pausing to honour the pioneers who paved the aisle-long way. Enter Alice Shopland: quiet rebel, reluctant entrepreneur, and the founder of New Zealand's first vegan cheese company, Angel Food. Her just-released book, Cheese Matters: To Kind Humans, is less manifesto, more memoir, charting her journey from plastic-bag-battling Grey Lynn mum to one of New Zealand’s most dogged food innovators.

Alice Shopland- Founder, CEO - Angel Food Vegan Cheese

Alice Shopland’s story doesn’t begin in a flashy lab or with a Silicon Valley pitch deck. It begins with a push mower, a cloth shopping bag, and an unexpected vegan awakening at age 38—thanks to a man named Billy who showed her that ethics, not extremism, defined the vegan path.

Within six weeks, Alice Shopland went from omnivore to advocate. Within a year, she'd launched a tiny import business hawking Scottish Scheese from her living room fridge. And within a decade, Angel Food was on the menu at Hell Pizza, slathered across meat-free pies from one end of the country to the other.

Her book is candid, often funny, and sometimes raw. It’s the kind of honesty you rarely see in the world of polished plant-based PR. Alice Shopland doesn’t shy away from early failures: dodgy cheese textures, crushed import boxes, cashew cheese fermenting beside the cat litter tray. She owns her missteps (including naming her first brand "Vegan Vittles," which no one could pronounce), but also her purpose. “Food is fascinating,” she writes, “It’s entwined with our identities. But it’s also one of the fastest ways we can make a massive positive impact.”

That kind of impact has kept Angel Food going through cash flow stress, supermarket negotiations, and even a disastrous first production run where the cheese clogged pipes at a pilot plant. But Shopland persevered, alongside husband Colin, food technologist Jan Wuis, and a rotating cast of part-time helpers turned full-time team members. Their breakthrough? A homegrown mozzarella that could survive a commercial pizza oven and please a Kiwi palate. From there came cheddar, cream cheese, feta and more, all 100% vegan and made in New Zealand.

But Cheese Matters isn’t just about cheese. It’s about cultural dissonance, about the everyday hypocrisy we live with, and about the exhausting, but vital, pursuit of ethical consistency. Alice Shopland calls it “confronting compassion,” the kind that doesn’t just extend to animals, but to the planet, and to our own human frailty. Her tone is gentle, but firm. Idealistic, but not naïve. “Being human is complicated,” she reminds us. “We need empathy, but we also need to put limits on it, or we’ll collapse into sad little puddles.”

Cheese Matters by Alice Shopland

It’s also a deeply personal tale. Alice Shopland shares memories of childhood camping trips, flounder spears, and watching cheese tastings with her freelance journalist hat on long before veganism took hold. She opens up about burnout, solo parenthood, and near-death moments for the company, both metaphorical and financial. It’s this mix of vulnerability and vision that makes Cheese Matters worth reading, whether you’re plant-based curious or just tired of the PR-spin served up with your soy latte.

And what’s next? Angel Food, with over 340 shareholders and a national supermarket footprint, isn’t slowing down. But Alice Shopland's eyes remain firmly on the mission - lowering the barrier to veganism, one smoky cheddar or sour cream tub at a time.

As the book reminds us, quoting Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, “Don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything. Do something. Anything.” Alice Shopland did something. And thanks to her, cheese matters. in more ways than one.

Want to read Alice’s full story? “Cheese Matters: To Kind Humans” is out now via Queens Park Press or CONTACT HERE.

Audio Sponsors Link

ENDS: