If you want free cheese, make haste to New Zealand. And get ready to pay with your time.
If you want free cheese, make haste to New Zealand. And get ready to pay with your time. Alice Rouse Donovan

One of New Zealand’s best-known local cheesemakers, Mainland Cheese, is enticing dairy enthusiasts with free cheese these days. The catch? A test of one’s patience: You’ll need to successfully complete a 2,000-piece puzzle.

Earlier this week, the creative agency Colenso BBDO unveiled a head-scratcher of a promotional campaign for the cheesemaker entitled “the Mainland 2,000 Piece Voucher.” It invited cheese-lovers to get their hands on free cheese, as soon as they complete a complicated puzzle depicting a cheese. In their words, the puzzle takes “almost as long to make as our cheese does.” Anyone who finishes a puzzle can redeem it for free cheese.

Since late 2017, hopefuls have been applying for the vouchers, which the company gave out on Facebook. So far, the fastest puzzle builder has completed the puzzle in 45 hours.

The idea is to give cheese lovers a sense of how labor-intensive the cheese-making and aging process is, while also playing on the brand’s slogan: “Good things take time.” This isn’t the first time Mainland has offered cheesy rewards for their customers’ time. In 2015, the company offered a voucher to those who offered up the cheesiest one-liner. (The winning line: “What do u [sic] call cheese that’s not yours? Nacho cheese.”) While time-intensive, the puzzle is—dare we say—a very gouda idea.

Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
Sign up for our regular newsletter.