Not Your Ordinary Cheese
Trade Fair Promotes New Albanian Cheeses, Piques Interest of Retailers and Consumers

TIRANË--Cheese in Albania just got a bit tastier. On June 16th, ten dairy producers from across Albania participated in an USAID-organized trade fair to showcase their first venture into the production of gourmet cheeses for the domestic market.

For Albanian cheese-makers this event marks the beginning of their serious efforts to penetrate the increasingly lucrative market for imported cheeses.

Over 300 consumers, retailers and representatives of hotels and restaurants visited the fair. They lined up at the professionally prepared display stands to taste the newly produced cheeses including Emmental, Mozzarella, Gouda, Tomme de Savoie; Gravier, Maasdam, Camembert, Seller and Fontina. The retail shop set up for visitors sold more than 120 kilos of cheese that day.

Three food retailers, including the first and only hypermarket in Albania, Euromax, have expressed an interest in placing orders for cheeses.

“Customers are interested in the way a product tastes and its price,” said Mr. Michel Brule, general manager of Euromax, in a speech at the event “It is not necessary to buy Gruyere cheese from Switzerland, goat cheese from France, or blue cheese from Italy. All of the producers here possess the raw materials, and, with basic training and reasonable improvements in product conservation, you all can produce the cheeses that we are currently importing into Albania.”

Just ten years ago, however, Albania’s dairy sector would have been an unlikely candidate to inspire such confidence. At the time, milk and dairy products in Albania were produced in kettles over wood-burning fires, stored in left-over plastic bottles, and sold on the streets of local neighborhoods.

A previous USAID project, implemented by Land O’Lakes, was credited with helping to revitalize Albania’s dairy sector and moving it from subsistent to commercial production. Since 2002, USAID’s Small Business Credit and Assistance (SBCA) project has assisted more than 69 dairy producers throughout Albania to adopt new production techniques, develop brand identities, and apply modern packaging.

Despite progress in sanitation and quality standards, the Albanian dairy sector still faces significant challenges. The trade fair is just one way the project has tried to communicate to dairy producers the importance of adopting new practices to improve their domestic performance and respond to future market demands.

One such challenge is the lack of product differentiation among cheese producers. Albanian dairies produce two kinds of traditional Mediterranean cheese varieties–a yellow hard or semi-hard cheese, kaçkavall, and a soft white cheese, feta. In stores, these cheeses have no identifying characteristics beyond a retailer’s tag naming the town or region of production. For the Albanian small dairy producer, this anonymity is a significant impediment to competition and growth, thus proper labeling and branding, such as stamping cheeses with an edible casein labels, promises to lead to significant improvements in brand identification.

Diversification is also taking place in the market. New market segments are looking for more sophisticated cheeses, and filling the gap are imports. Albanian producers, feeling the weight of shrinking profits and recognizing the potential of expanding their product lines, expressed an interest in trying to reproduce the new cheeses entering Albania.

These challenges, coupled with the recent signing of the Stabilization Association Agreement, which will liberalize trade between European Union nations and Albania, mean that Albanian businesses will need to take more concrete, and perhaps more creative steps to increase their competitiveness.

In January 2006, the project brought in a cheese specialist from France to teach dairies specific ripening techniques, introduce new cultures, and advise on particular environmental and temperature controls. The results of Mr. Carheil’s work—the production of more than 850 kilos of gourmet cheeses.

“New Cheeses of Albania” proved that Albanian enterprises can produce a wide variety of cheeses with a high standard of quality and package products in consumer-friendly quantities—the first true taste of success.