Mainland cheese now made up North

Mainland Cheese is no longer made on the Mainland. Photo / Herald on Sunday

It's our best-known cheese brand, identified with everything that is good and true and, well, southern. But Mainland cheese is not made on the Mainland.

According to the international marketing, Mainland emerged from New Zealand's deep south in 1955.

The pictures are of chortling brooks and the hills and snowcapped mountains of Otago and Southland. But the cheese is actually made at a factory in Hautapu in the Waikato and trucked to the small Taranaki town of Eltham to be cut and packaged.

Yesterday, southern mayors expressed not-entirely-serious outrage and proposed a protest march on the North Island.

They have a point. When New Zealand winemakers began calling their sparkling wines champagne, the French took umbrage - and legal action. When DB threatened to close its Greymouth brewery and brew West Coast beer Monteith's in Auckland, Coasters were horrified.

But South Islanders have allowed Fonterra to quietly shift the manufacture of Mainland ripe cheddars north - without kicking up a stink.

Fonterra brands managing director Peter McClure denied the ads were misleading. "[Mainland] has a long heritage of coming from the South Island," he said. "I don't think there's anything misleading about it."

Mainland spokeswoman Lily Carlyon said the ads had "tended to focus on South Island image", saying the name and advertising "speak to its heritage and values".

Mainland's websites say the cheese company was founded in Dunedin in 1955, but not that it's now made in the North Island.

Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt, a vocal advocate of the Deep South, despite being an Aucklander, said Fonterra might argue that it didn't matter where the cheese was made.

"They're using the qualities and the philosophies and characteristics of the South Island."

But Christchurch mayor Bob Parker said Mainlanders should march on the North Island, armed with cheese sticks.

"I think that's a little bit of a cheesy con," he said. "Advertising has a duty to inform people truthfully. They want to give it all the qualities of the life in the South Island - I think that's a bit naughty, don't you?"

Queenstown mayor Clive Geddes said the ads were a great promotion for the South Island, regardless of the product.

And advertising and marketing expert Dave Bibby said Mainland was "evoking an image". Where the cheese was made was "a technical issue".

TAKING TIME FOR MAINLAND

Kevin Corcoran is 76 and could hardly be more Mainland: after farming all his life in Gore he has retired to Cromwell, where - yes - he still eats "heaps" of Mainland cheese.

"As much as I can get," he says.

And so he should.

He and Terry Procter have, for some years, been the faces of Mainland, the two ruddy-faced codgers who are happy to let the cheese wait while they spend another day, week or even a year fishing.

"Good things take time," they say.

Yesterday Procter, a former painter and decorator living in Picton, defended the campaign.

"The beautiful scenery of New Zealand is what we're trying to sell," he says.

"I don't care if it's made in Eltham or the Waikato or where it's made."

The men were picked by Mainland talent scouts in the late 1990s to star in the ads.

"We were plucked out of the blue," Procter said.

"We knew nothing about TV or cheese or bugger all."

The first ad featured the pair whiling away the hours (as the cheese matures) playing a word game connecting species of fish with popular singers. Cod Stewart, Squid Vicious, Cinnamon Davis Junior, Tim and Eel Finn...

Procter didn't know if the pair would feature in the new Mainland advertising campaign, beginning soon, but said the old ads still appeared in Australia.

THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN

Don't mess with the South. That's what some of New Zealand's biggest firms have learned when they tried to cut the apron strings.

DB faced outrage when it tried to shut the 150-year-old Monteith's Brewery in Greymouth in 2001. Even Prime Minister Helen Clark said New Zealanders should boycott the beer following the decision. The brewery was saved and now some of the beer is made in Greymouth and the rest in Auckland. Cadbury - once New Zealand's most-trusted brand - fell foul of the nation last year when it announced some of our favourite sweets would be made in Thailand, instead of Dunedin. Cadbury had already faced wrath for moving much of its chocolate production to Tasmania, including the Cream Egg.