The London, Ontario vegan chef who set out to make cashew cheese the way dairy cheese is made: cultured, fermented, and aged

A cheese board on a restaurant menu becomes a company

The Nuts For Cheese story starts in a restaurant kitchen. Margaret Coons was working as a chef at a vegan restaurant in London, Ontario, when she began experimenting with ways to make creamy, satisfying cheese out of nuts and seeds. A cashew-based cheese board she put on the menu became a popular order, and in 2015 she started selling her cheeses at a local farmers' market. As the brand tells it on its about page, Nuts For Cheese "was born in 2015 at a farmer's market in London, Ontario."

The decision that shaped everything afterward was a technical one. Instead of chasing the melt-and-stretch behaviour of processed dairy cheese with starches and refined oils, Coons built her recipes around fermentation. Nuts For Cheese cultures a cashew base with house-made cultures and ages the results, the same basic sequence a dairy cheesemaker follows. That is an unusual choice in plant-based dairy, where most of the category is engineered for functionality rather than fermentation, and it is the through-line that still defines the brand.

Coons is a London native with an honours degree in English Language and Literature from Western University, in the same city. She remains the founder and CEO, and the company is still independent and founder-led. That continuity matters for a brand whose entire positioning rests on doing the harder, slower version of vegan cheese: the person who decided to ferment and age a cashew base is still the one running the business.

What actually makes plant-based cheese "cultured"

The word that does the work at Nuts For Cheese is cultured. The brand starts with organic cashews, soaks and blends them into a cashew milk, and ferments that base with live cultures before shaping and aging the cheese. Nuts For Cheese uses an organic quinoa rejuvelac as its fermentation culture, and rounds out the recipes with ingredients like coconut oil, nutritional yeast, and chickpea miso. Some of the wedges are finished with hand-painted rinds, a detail borrowed directly from artisan dairy cheesemaking.

The company is deliberate about what is not in the product. Its own materials describe the cheeses as made "without additives, preservatives, stabilizers, or gums," and 100% dairy-free and vegan. That is a meaningful contrast in a category where the mass-market default is a formulated blend built to behave like cheese on a pizza. Nuts For Cheese is trying to taste like cheese because it is fermented and aged like cheese, not because it is engineered to imitate the melt.

This is the same live-culture logic that RISE Kombucha built a Montreal beverage brand around, applied to the cheese board instead of the fridge door. Fermentation is the product, not a marketing note.

From a rented kitchen to a certified-organic factory

A cultured, aged cheese made in-house is an operations problem as much as a recipe. To make Nuts For Cheese at national retail scale, Coons had to build a factory. The company progressed from a rented commercial kitchen to a purpose-built, certified-organic production facility of roughly 25,000 square feet in London, Ontario, and then leased an additional 5,000 square feet in the same building to keep up with demand. The facility and offices are at 20 Pacific Court in London.

The build-out was funded in part by outside capital. In June 2022, Nuts For Cheese announced a CA$5.35 million round to expand manufacturing and distribution. According to coverage in Food Engineering and the London Economic Development Corporation, the round was led by Forage Capital Partners and included CPG veterans Mike Fata, a co-founder of Manitoba Harvest, and Dror Balshine. The capital went toward equipment and facility upgrades, key hires, product innovation, and marketing.

Self-manufacturing is the strategic point, not just a logistics footnote. Because Nuts For Cheese owns its fermentation and aging process end to end, it controls the part of the product that is hardest to outsource. A co-packer can blend and fill; culturing and aging a cashew cheese to a consistent, branded flavour is a capability you build, not a service you buy.

What is actually in the lineup

The current Nuts For Cheese range at nutsforcheese.com is built around four product families, all on the same organic cashew base. The flagship is the Nuts For Cheese cultured cashew cheese wedge, sold in multiple aged flavours, including the brie-style Un-Brie-Lievable. These are the SKUs the brand was built on and the clearest expression of the cultured-and-aged approach.

Around the wedges sits a widening pantry. Nuts For Cream Cheese is the spreadable, bagel-and-toast entry point. Nuts For Butter is a cultured dairy-free butter. And the newest addition is Nuts For Dips, a line of creamy cashew dips that extends the brand from the cheese board into the snacking aisle. Each new format leans on the same core competency: a fermented, organic cashew base the company already knows how to make at scale.

The organic-and-fairtrade sourcing discipline behind those cashews echoes the small-farm sourcing story Cha's Organics built its Montreal pantry line around. For a brand that ferments and ages, the quality of the base ingredient is not a detail. It is the raw material of the flavour.

How Nuts For Cheese stacks up in the plant-based cheese aisle

The plant-based cheese category splits cleanly into two camps: the melting brands engineered from oils and starches, and the cultured brands fermented from a whole-food base. Here is how Nuts For Cheese reads against the comparison set:

Formats and origins reflect each brand's publicly listed range as of July 2026. Retailer availability reflects North American market presence as of July 2026.

Reading across the row, Nuts For Cheese's position becomes distinct. Daiya, also a Canadian brand out of Vancouver, and Violife, owned by Upfield, are the melting-cheese benchmarks with the widest grocery placement, but both are formulated for function rather than fermented. Blue Heron in British Columbia and Miyoko's Creamery in California are the cultured-cheese peers Nuts For Cheese belongs beside on flavour and method. What separates Nuts For Cheese is that it runs the cultured, certified-organic playbook at national retail scale from a single Ontario factory it owns.

A woman-founded brand that kept its receipts

Nuts For Cheese is a woman-founded and woman-led company, and a certified 2SLGBTQ+-owned business through the Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce. Those are not just identity labels on the website; they show up in outside recognition. Margaret Coons was named a 2023 Top 25 Women of Influence honouree, and the company won the Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year and Exporter of the Year awards the same year.

The brand's organic and manufacturing credentials have been recognized on the record as well, including a Canada Organic Trade Association innovation award and a local Best Places to Work listing. Nuts For Cheese has also been profiled by outlets including CBC News in its home market of London, Ontario. None of these is a self-administered brand claim. Each is an outside recognition, year-stamped and verifiable.

Sources

Nuts For Cheese's primary social presence is on Instagram at @nutsforcheese. The feed leans into the making of the product: the London factory, the cultured wedges, recipe ideas, and the team. The brand also uses it to show shoppers how to actually build a plant-based cheese board, which reinforces that Nuts For Cheese is a working manufacturer, not a marketing exercise.

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes to a Nuts For Cheese brand page, product collection, or store locator rather than a generic homepage, so you can find the actual product without hunting:

To find a nearby grocer or an online stockist, use the store locator at nutsforcheese.com/pages/where-to-buy.

Bottom line

Nuts For Cheese took the harder road through the plant-based cheese aisle. Instead of formulating a melt, Margaret Coons built a brand around fermentation and aging, then built the certified-organic factory in London, Ontario, to make it at scale. The result is a cultured, whole-food cashew cheese that competes on flavour and method rather than on how well it stretches, sold at grocery retailers across Canada and the United States and still run by the chef who started it at a farmers' market in 2015. If you want to see what they have built, the full lineup at nutsforcheese.com is the fastest entry point.