“So many people seemed to know him here,” he said of his grandfather Brian Davies, who worked for the Eltham rennet factory out of university in the 1960s before coming back to the factory in his executive role with the Taranaki Cooperative Dairy Company in the 1970s.

But the family connection was not quite as it seemed.

“There was a funny coincidence,” Haycock said.

He soon noticed a service board in the break room. Scanning it he could not find his grandfather’s name, but there was a Brian Davis and the penny, or more precisely the “e”, dropped. The workers indeed remembered a Brian, just not Haycock’s grandfather Brian.

“I had to go around telling all the people on the floor ‘you didn’t know my granddad’,” he said.

The 25-year-old Massey University food tech graduate has been in Eltham this summer as part of the Fonterra Graduate Technical Programme, which sees 16 graduates paid to study and work at Fonterra facilities to achieve their Master’s Degree.

At the Eltham cheese factory Haycock has been watching and learning the process of taking raw ingredients and making them into packaged products like cheese slices and speciality cheese.

One of the more surprising things he has learned was just what camembert looks like before it’s wrapped in paper.

“It has this quite thick layer of mould. Like a cloud. That gets squashed down when it’s wrapped so you don’t see it,” he said.

Though he grew up in Auckland and lives in Remuera, Haycock is no stranger to the green pastures of Taranaki, having often visited family in the region.

His mother Kim Davies-Haycock went to high school in Stratford and has fond memories of her time there, he said.

So does Haycock. A keen golfer he has managed to play rounds at Hāwera, Te Ngutu and Stratford.

The key difference to Auckland city courses, he said, was that he didn’t have to book a time two weeks in advance and green fees don’t lighten your pocket quite as much.