The tag line on the Max & Bien website is promising: “The tastiest alternative to cheese”.1 We have reviewed all three of their currently available cheeses: Herbs & Garlic, Truffle, and Tomato & Olive to see if we agree to this ambitious statement. In this review we look at the Tomato & Olive product, however our review outcomes are similar for the other two varieties as the base of the cheese appears to be the same, while the flavouring differs.
On the packaging it mentions: ‘traditionally crafted in Holland’, ‘made by chefs’, ‘award-winning’, ‘lactose-free’, ‘rich in vitamin B12’.
Our interest was drawn firstly to the award-winning statement, wondering which prize the cheese we bought had won. Checking out the website we find “the public’s favourite during the Veggiebeurs event, and won an award for the best vegan business venture”.2 After some digging on the internet, we find this most likely refers to the Proveg Vegan Cheese Awards of March 2020 in Utrecht, where a Max & Bien blue cheese wrapped in grape leaves based on cashew nuts won the audience award. Such a cheese does sound delicious to us and congratulations for winning the award Max & Bien!
The award-winning blue cheese wrapped in grape leaves definitely sounds like a traditional, hand-made product to us. The cheese we review four years later appears quite a different product though. No grape leaves, cashews, blue mould or award as far as we could see. It appears Max & Bien went in the meantime through a growth trajectory where the cheese is now more industrially processed for a larger market, where the grape leaves are replaced by the colourful inorganic coating of a typical Dutch cheese wheel and ingredients changed from nuts to coconut oil and modified potato starch.
What we like about the cheese is the competitive prize, the long shelf life, the focus on sustainability from the company in sourcing primarily local ingredients. On the other hand, in our review we could unfortunately not agree to the tagline of “the tastiest alternative to cheese”. While this cheese may work well for melting, or you may try it in combination with other food as per the recipes on the website, as a stand-alone cheese it does not make it to our cheese platter. That is primarily because of the taste and consistency. The taste is in our view quite bland, we assume reflecting the taste of the base of coconut oil, modified potato starch and tapioca (cassava starch). Only the flavour additives appear to give it, well, flavour, but struggle to get a tasty, cheese-like result. Additionally, the mix of oil and starch does not convey to us the same protein-based, cheese-like, mouthfeel as nuts can achieve.
Compared to the Herbs & Garlic and Truffle flavours we thought this Tomato & Olive flavour was a bit less clear and we rate this variety slightly below the other two.
Max & Bien has a relatively long history since 2018 in making a wide variety of vegan cheese and butter. Whereas these current cheeses may be well-suited for higher volumes at a reasonable cost, we look forward to seeing Max & Bien’s vegan cheese-making knowledge applied again to something with an irresistible taste and feel, like the award-winning blue cheese in grape leaves.
