Look out Tinseltown: an Oamaru cheese company is making waves with its whey, and revealed its flagship blue-vein cheese was a favourite with a recently deceased Hollywood icon.

Whitestone Cheese, which is celebrating 30 years in business, became a fixture at the Playboy Mansion after founder Hugh Hefner developed a taste for its soft buttery texture.

Chief executive Simon Berry said the cheese had a global reach, with supplies found in Fiji, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Qatar, as well as Hollywood.

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner was fond of Whitestone Cheese's blue-vein varieties.

"He had these big parties and got our cheese through a Los Angeles cafe," Berry said.

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"We caught word from our distributor that Hugh had acquired a taste for it, he was actually requesting Windsor Blue for his parties so all of the celebrities were exposed to it there," Berry said.

SUPPLIED Cast members of the hit US TV show Scrubs were big fans of Whitestone Cheese.

"That was through our distributor in LA. She had connections with Fox Studios and into Hollywood, we were supplying into a artisan cafe that the stars would visit often."

The production crew and cast of hit noughties TV comedy Scrubs also became big fans of their Windsor Blue after discovering it at the same Los Angeles artisan cafe.

The cheese was used to cater for their season wrap parties.

RYAN DUNLOP/STUFF Whitestone Cheese chief exective Simon Berry shows off some of the product.

In fact, they liked it so much so that when they had had run dry of their supply from the cafe the company's founder, Simon's father Bob Berry, flew out to California and delivered it to them personally.

Simon Berry said Hefner would be turning in his grave if he knew he'd be missing out on the companies newest blue-cheese venture, the only of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

Berry said he, and the company's head cheese-maker Chris Moran, had spent months searching for mould to use for a new blue-vein cheese - even going on a "culture bio-prospecting" trip across the deep south in search of the perfect mould - but had no luck.

SUPPLIED Whitestone Cheese founder Bob Berry in the 1980s with one of the company's first cheeses.

They looked in limestone caves for the mould, the same type of caves found in Bath and Stilton, in England, where some of the most famous producers of blue vein cheese are produced.

After the team came up short, members of the company's lab team tracked down what they were looking for in the Mackenzie District.

"It (the type of mould they had sought) was brought in after it was found in some silage," Berry said.

SUPPLIED The company's first premises was a former mechanics shop.

The blue mould was named 45 South Blue, given Oamaru's geographical coordinates, and the new cheese would be called "Shenley Station Blue" after the farm it was found on, Berry said.

They were inspired by the myth of the first discovery of blue-vein cheese by a French shepherd hundreds of years ago.

The shepherd had been walking through the hills and decided to stash his cheese in a Limestone cave.

RYAN DUNLOP/STUFF Cheese maker Vinny Smith cuts the curd of a fresh batch of cheese destined to be Camembert.

"He came back a week or so later and pulled the cheese out and it had blue mould on it," Berry said.

The cave provided the ideal environment to grow the special cheese and the company replicated the process in the factory.

"We replicate that cheese cave in terms of humidity, temperature and environment."

It was rather Kiwi that the mould was found in silage and had "in some way it is related back to farming" the nations biggest industry, he said.

The discovery of a new type of cheese was a big win for the company, which was founded by Bob Berry in a bid to diversify the family farming business for stability following the introduction of Rogernomics.

The company has grown from one part-time employee in a mechanics shop to 75 full-time staff across the country, and now operates in a 1500 square metre factory.