Cheese Matters: To Kind People
Reviews
“So excited to have received my copy of ‘Cheese Matters’. I highly recommend reading it. It’s by Alice Shopland from Angel Food.
“Alice is someone who has made a huge positive impact for vegans in Aotearoa. She started the country’s first vegan cheese company (still going strong) and has developed many other vegan products in the process. She writes about that journey but also delves into other issues along the way relating to being vegan in Aotearoa.
“The book resonated with me because unlike most vegan books, it wasn’t a vegan recruitment book aimed at convincing the reader to go vegan. (Having said that, it would still be super helpful for a non-vegan to read it.) This book is one written by someone who has been vegan for a long time and who understands the complexities of being vegan in a non-vegan world. That is a rare perspective to be written about. Plus, it is written with good humour and years of vegan experience and thoughts.
“This book is easy to read, very relatable and quite inspiring. There is so much in ‘Cheese Matters’ that resonated with me and I know I’ll be quoting from it in the future.”
— Yolanda Soryl CNZM, president of the Christchurch Vegan Society
“Cheese Matters by Alice Shopland is every bit as good as could be expected, in light of the intelligence, warmth, humanity and humour with which the author has written for decades in numerous articles and blogs.
“It is -- if given proper exposure -- as likely as anything else to veganise the masses, because it nudges rather than pushes, and informs (with strong statistics and logic) rather than rails.
“It's a warm and welcoming, even folksy at times, life-story-cookbook-"dietribe" rather than any sort of diatribe. It's a great read for either the "vegan-curious", as the author puts it, or the veteran vegan.”
— Billy Leonard
In the media
Planet Food News
Cheese With a Conscience and The Alice Shopland Angel Food Story
August 1, 2025
In an age when plant-based is being polished and commodified by the big boys, it’s worth pausing to honour the pioneers who paved the aisle-long way. Enter Alice Shopland: quiet rebel, reluctant entrepreneur, and the founder of New Zealand's first vegan cheese company, Angel Food. Her just-released book, Cheese Matters: To Kind Humans, is less manifesto, more memoir, charting her journey from plastic-bag-battling Grey Lynn mum to one of New Zealand’s most dogged food innovators.
Alice Shopland’s story doesn’t begin in a flashy lab or with a Silicon Valley pitch deck. It begins with a push mower, a cloth shopping bag, and an unexpected vegan awakening at age 38—thanks to a man named Billy who showed her that ethics, not extremism, defined the vegan path.
Within six weeks, Alice Shopland went from omnivore to advocate. Within a year, she'd launched a tiny import business hawking Scottish Scheese from her living room fridge. And within a decade, Angel Food was on the menu at Hell Pizza, slathered across meat-free pies from one end of the country to the other.
Her book is candid, often funny, and sometimes raw. It’s the kind of honesty you rarely see in the world of polished plant-based PR. Alice Shopland doesn’t shy away from early failures: dodgy cheese textures, crushed import boxes, cashew cheese fermenting beside the cat litter tray. She owns her missteps (including naming her first brand "Vegan Vittles," which no one could pronounce), but also her purpose. “Food is fascinating,” she writes, “It’s entwined with our identities. But it’s also one of the fastest ways we can make a massive positive impact.” (Read the full article here.)
Newtownabbey Times
Glengormley entrepreneur's new book explores veganism, dairy alternatives and making kind choices
July 17, 2025
Alice Shopland penned ‘Cheese Matters: to kind people’ as a love letter to cheese – both plant-based and dairy – and as a heartfelt guide for anyone who cares about animals, people, and the planet.
From the environmental impacts of dairy production to the complexities of pet ownership in a vegan lifestyle, the book explores what it really means to live kindly in today’s world.
Originally from New Zealand, Alice, who has a background in journalism, has lived in the Queen’s Park area of Glengormley since 2023.
She became vegan in 2004 and, two years later, founded her company Angel Food with the aim of making veganism more mainstream.
Making the transition to a vegan diet initially had its challenges. “I used to eat so much dairy cheese so I would have to figure out what do I put in my sandwich, or on my pasta,” said Alice. “At that time there were no vegan cheese alternatives available.”
At first, the business imported vegan cheeses from the UK before the company decided to try making their own.
"There is a market for it and plenty of people who are interested [in veganism] for things like environmental reasons, or food intolerances,” the 60-year-old added. “But New Zealand has a heavy reliance on animal agriculture and in the early days it was hard to get the product onto supermarket shelves.
“I had one guy at a food show tell me I was a traitor for producing vegan cheese. There are other people who do get it [the concept of veganism], but they get very upset at the idea of anyone trying to control what they are eating.
"But I understand that there’s also a lot of emotional associations with food that go beyond our earliest memories, like what our parents fed us because they cared for us.” (Read the full article here.)