PREACHER’s daughter Ailsa Proverbs experienced what proved to be a life-changing moment while thinking about cheese rather than spiritual matters.

The marketing expert, whose mum was one of the first female ministers in the Church of Scotland, was watching TV chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall talk about making yoghurt one night when her mind went off in another direction.

“In a weird train of thought, I wondered if you could make cheese, how would you go about that, and I thought I’d like to do that and went to look for a kit so that I could do it and realised that there wasn’t one,” recalls Ms Proverbs.

Where most people might have been prepared to make do with buying cheese in, the disappointment set Ms Proverbs off on a journey which has resulted in her becoming a successful entrepreneur and winning royal recognition to boot.

After research on the internet convinced her it was not all that difficult to make cheese she decided to make a kit for herself that would help cut the costs involved.

“I’d researched how you could do it and I thought actually this process is not too difficult and I’d like to try it myself. But to be able to do that you have to buy a stack of citric acid and a load of rennet tablets that cost you a fortune. It wasn’t easy to buy all the important parts.”

Ms Proverbs produced two kits containing what she reckoned were the essential elements, gave them to focus groups to test and sat back to wait for their feedback while preparing to give birth to her second daughter.

The responses from the 20 participants were helpful enough for her to commit months to working on packs to get them ready for the market.

She felt ready to take the risk of launching a kit in 2012 when her daughter Fia was seven months old.

Five years later Ms Proverbs’s Big Cheese Making Kit operation has annual sales of around £1 million.

Run from Edinburgh, the business has developed packs that allow people to try making cheeses ranging from Scottish Crowdie to Greek Feta.

She is about to expand the range by adding an eighth cheese, the details of which are under wraps.

“I think it’s going to be big. I’m getting great feedback.”

The success suggests the social science graduate is a natural businesswoman.

But she admits it owed something to luck.

“The idea was we would have a web site and it would be on Not on the High Street and that would be it. I thought I could make it from home and service those two online markets myself but then a blogger picked up on it and blogged about it.”

The website featuring the blog, Domestic Sluttery, was new to Ms Proverbs but the results of its interest in her kits were remarkable.

“At that time I was taking orders on my phone and it would ping when there was an order and then one evening it started pinging like crazy.”

“We were approached by retailers asking if they could stock it which had not been in the plan, and there were literally 400 orders in one evening.”

The success was very welcome but forced Ms Proverbs to reconsider her plan to run the operation in her spare room.

She out-sourced production initially to a social enterprise, Haven Products in Inverness. The kits are now assembled at the Sykes fulfilment operation in Galashiels.

Ms Proverbs has learned a huge amount about market dynamics in the months since she discovered the power of bloggers.

She won lots of business after appearing at a farm shop and deli show, where the kit scooped a best new product award.

Both Harrods and Selfridges subsequently asked to stock the kits. House of Fraser signed up last year.

Amazon has been a good source of orders, although Ms Proverbs was initially reluctant to list kits on the site because she was not sure the brands were complementary.

She finds the online giant is fine to deal but notes it took some time to get to grips with how its system operates. Companies that sell through Amazon hire storage space in its logistics centres.

The Big Cheese Making Kit stopped using distributors, who determine which clients will get products and take some profit margin.

Setbacks have included disappointing sales of hampers at Christmas three years ago.

The recent festive season went well, however.

Ms Proverbs has had a great time running the business, while enjoying the flexibility that her entrepreneurial life offers.

Perks have included taking the time to complete a masters degree in gastronomy at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. This involved writing a 12,000-word dissertation on the subject of the representation of gut health in newspapers which she completed last year.

Ms Proverbs got her first degree at the age of 19 from Stirling University.

She sees plenty of scope to grow in the core UK market where the firm has hundreds of retailers on its books. The business may expand into the US, possibly with kits produced stateside.

Language issues make the idea of setting up in Europe less appealing.

The Big Cheese Making Kit is still a relatively young business but Ms Proverbs has already made a contribution to the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Her name appeared on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2014, when she was awarded an MBE for service to the food industry.

It took a phone call to the authorities to reassure her the notification of the award was not a prank.

“A rather posh lady said I can assure you there hasn’t been a mistake.”

And besides encouraging lots of people to make cheese, Ms Proverbs has inspired others to start businesses.

“I met a curry kit maker recently who said you paved the way for us, our business had been a blue print. He was very nice about it.”