This is a corpus-based contrastive study of online cheese descriptions in English and Spanish. For global trade, English is considered the lingua franca, and Spanish dairy industries need to produce accurate descriptions of the cheeses they manufacture for commercial purposes. This paper provides native speakers of Spanish with the main rhetorical, phraseological and lexical features of this text type in English, highlighting the major differences with the same text type in Spanish. The empirical data have been extracted from a comparable corpus containing 22,834 words in English and 24,736 words in Spanish. The corpus was tagged with rhetorical labels to enable a subsequent analysis of the most common phraseological and lexical resources employed for the description of cheese in both languages. The study offers non-native writers of this subgenre in English guidelines about the structure of these texts, as well as an inventory of ready-made phraseological and lexical units
