“It’s about honouring and respecting what he has done, but connecting it to our own voice,” Ellie adds. “Part of the reason we set up Studd Siblings was to curate our own voice, because we don’t just want to be ‘Will Studd’s kids’, as much as we love our old man and he’s done so much for the industry,” Sam says. On the side they’ve launched the Studd Siblings platform to educate the public with masterclasses and media gigs. Ellie has a marketing role in their “day job”, while Sam is across sales. They both became members of the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers and passed an American-based exam to become Certified Cheese Professionals (CCPs).Ĭredentials in place, they were finally ready to join their father’s business importing cheese to Australia and the USA, sourced from family farms around the world. He worked at artisan cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, USA Ellie picked up experience at Neal’s Yard Dairy in the UK and later got a job at Melbourne’s Spring Street Grocer. “To be honest, in the beginning wasn’t particularly encouraged, so we really had to go out and cut our teeth,” Sam says. Sam is the youngest, Ellie is the middle child. They have an older sister, Fleur, who runs successful coffee business Market Lane. When their dad started talking about retiring a few years ago, the siblings realised they had too much assumed cheese knowledge and weren’t ready to farewell fromage. She fills a bowl with golden honey, slices a fresh baguette from nearby bakery Loafer Bread, fans out some fruit crackers, and opens a block of Le Gruyere bought on a recent trip to Switzerland. As his face glows on the bench, Ellie unwraps a wheel of Brillat-Savarin soft-ripened cheese imported by their family business, Selected by Will Studd. We’re sitting in the kitchen of Ellie’s cute-as-a-button terrace house in Melbourne’s inner north, talking to Sam on a laptop from his home in Byron Bay. So whether we liked it or not, the family trips were often orientated around cheese.” “We spent a lot of our school holidays travelling around Europe, where Dad would deal with producers, and we’d be hanging out with the kids. “Dad does cast a very big shadow and I mean that in the nicest way possible,” Sam tells Broadsheet. But since their father, Will Studd, has been the most influential Australian name in cheese for over four decades, they couldn’t avoid the family business forever. After leaving school, Sam rode motorbikes across India and worked in hospitality, while Ellie was a clinical nurse consultant at the Royal Children’s Hospital for 10 years. Siblings Sam and Ellie Studd were destined to work in the world of cheese, but it took them a while to realise it.
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