TELFORD: When Brexit abruptly ended British cheesemaker Michael Hartes ambitious European export plans, four years passed before his young company Bridge Cheese found overseas customers for its cheddar and mozzarella products again — in faraway Hong Kong.

Harte had banked on a soft Brexit’ that kept frictionless trade after Britain’s shock June 23, 2016 decision to leave the European Union, he said. Instead, the worlds fifth-biggest economy left the common market completely, putting up barriers to the giant on its doorstep.

From its base in Telford, central England — a town best known as the birthplace of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution that helped spread the idea of open economies around the globe — Bridge Cheese’s pivot to Asia is now bearing fruit.

This year, it expects to sell more than double the volume of processed cheese to Hong Kong than the annual 100,000 tons it used to send to Europe. Harte hopes to start exports to Malaysia this year and is seeking approvals in Vietnam, Thailand and mainland China and other markets. But between shortly after the Brexit barriers went up and late 2025, Bridge Cheese had booked no overseas sales at all, relying instead on slowing domestic growth to keep the business going.

Harte has no doubt his company’s growth would have been much stronger if Britain could still trade freely with its neighbours. Before Brexit, “you could make a pallet of cheese here on a Monday and have it with the customer in France or Ireland by Wednesday,” Harte said, recalling plans he had to expand rapidly into Spain and Italy.

He abandoned sales to the continent six months after a post-Brexit trade deal was implemented in 2021 because of the new costs of doing business — including mandatory veterinary checks costing 500 per inspection — as well as reams of customs paperwork and border delays which increased lead times. “We just weren’t competitive,” said Harte.

Now, it costs his firm the same for veterinary certification of a 40-foot container carrying 16,800 kg of cheese to Asia as it would do for just two pallets totalling 1,200 kg sent to the EU, Harte said. And the paperwork is less onerous. Like Bridge Cheese, which has an annual turnover of around 35 million ($47 million), thousands of British companies have been forced to find ways to compensate for the loss of free access to their main foreign market, with food producers among the hardest hit.

Although the EU remains the UK’s biggest trading partner, a range of manufacturers have felt the impact, adding to the list of problems facing the economy which has been stuck in a slow-growth rut since the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

“Make an economy less open and it will restrict growth, though over a longer time trade will adjust and rebuild,” Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last October. So far, that rebuild has proven tentative.

UK exports plummet

Volumes of UK food exports to the bloc were down by more than 23pc between 2021 and 2025 compared with the five years prior to Brexit, according to the Food and Drink Federation. By 2024, around 20,000 small firms, among them food producers, had stopped exporting goods to the EU, reducing the total to around 100,000, according to a report by the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2026