Not a trendy product?

"There is a general trend of falling demand for cheese, which is not just maintained from year to year, but is becoming more serious. In general, there are a couple of reasons. First, it is the decline of incomes of the Russians. Secondly, it is the fear to buy a defective product, and at the moment, we can say, that cheese has fallen out of the basket of necessary products: if earlier, cheese was considered useful, today the question arises among buyers, whether it is useful, whether it is worth eating it? I believe that the image of cheese as a useful product is deteriorated very much. Accordingly, this contributes to the decline in demand," commented Maria Koval, the owner of "The Private dairy of Maria Koval".

It has to be mentioned that in the first quarter of 2017 the Federal customs service noted a decrease in imports of cheese by 15.1%. By the results of the first half of the year imports of cheese also continued to decline. As it was already written by The DairyNews, cheese-making is unanimously accepted by the experts and participants of the market as the industry having the greatest effect from the sanctions imposed three years ago. According to Rosstat, the production of cheese and cheese products in 2015 increased by almost 20%. Market participants stress that the greatest dynamics was shown by the increase in the production of cheese products, however, other segments grew as well – in particular, production of cottage cheese and elite cheese. In 2015, imports of cheese and cottage cheese in Russia decreased by 36.5% and amounted to 201 thousand tons. In 2016 these trends continued, however, the growth rate of the production of cheese decreased significantly, and continued to decline in early 2017. The year 2015 turned out to be the most illustrative in terms of first effects on cheesemaking: when at the beginning of the year, retailers ran out of imported cheese and domestic producers only started to increase production.

From January to April of 2017 cheese production by enterprises of the Russian Federation increased by 1.2% (including growth of cottage cheese that amounted to 2.4%), cheese products - by 9.9%.

"If we talk about the quality of Russian cheese, I can say that it is decent, even good. If you compare the quality of factory-manufactured cheese, Russian cheeses are not competitive. However, if we consider a small private enterprise, as, for example, the business that I and my colleagues do, then perhaps such a product can be called competitive," explains his position Alexander Lebedev, the owner of Berezhkovskaya dairy.

"As for competitiveness of Russian cheese, the issue of naturality of the product remains acute. Imported cheeses in any case will have a certain share on our market. Cheese industry, which only began to emerge in Russia due to sanctions, is at a nascent stage. However, the production of cheese is significantly increasing, and I'm sure that every year our cheeses will be more competitive," says Maria Koval.

In general, according to some analysts, in order Russian buyers were able to see a competitive product on the shelves a certain period of time must pass, during which the Russian cheese market will finally emerge and companies will be able to produce quality and inexpensive cheese.

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