The Cheese Truck overreaches crowdfunding target by £30k

The business, run by Mathew Carver, started a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube on Friday 28 October with the intention of raising £100k to pay for equipment and supply working capital for the site in Camden's Stables Market. 

However, Carver closed the campaign less than a week later after securing his extended target of £130k. 

"I was really blown away at the support," Carver told BigHospitality. "It wasn't what I was expecting. I imagined we'd have a few investments made by friends and family, but there are 180 investors in total which is really fantastic. We've had such amazing support and it was so quick." 

Concepts​

The Cheese Bar in Camden will be Carver's second permanent site. The Cheese Truck's first site, Archie's Bar will open in Deptford in two weeks' time where it will serve grilled cheese sandwiches and craft beer. 

Its second site, which Carver said was inspired by specialist cheese bars in the US like Mission Cheese in San Francisco, will be larger and offer a 'cheese based menu' alongside cocktails, craft beers and wine. It will also sell cheese from British cheesemakers. 

Carver said he had always envisaged having two different cheese-based 'concepts' since he started out selling grilled cheese sandwiches from converted Bedford vans two years' ago. However, he believes that while the grilled cheese sandwich concept has 'scalability' The Cheese Bar is likely to be a 'one off'. 

"I have always seen two concepts in it, one is the Cheese Bar which is a strong concept, but is relatively niche and more of an occasion place where I'll have an opportunity to do something different," he said. 

"The other is a simpler concept of just grilled cheese sandwiches for £4-£5. We could have them in so many different places, it has real scalability, but we'll see how the Deptford site does first."