Bulgaria's food safety agency has told the makers of two "fresh cheese" brands to add the word "skimmed" to their product names. It won't fine them, the agency said.
The check followed a media investigation into cheese quality, which found almost no milk fat in 2 of 5 dairy products bought for testing.
The samples were picked at random. They were cheap products labelled "cheese", "fresh cheese" or "kashkaval", and the tests were run at the lab of the National Centre for Food Safety.
Three of the samples met the rules on milk fat. One yielded no fat at all for testing, and another yielded too little.
After the report came out, the agency ran its own check on the two products. It found both "fresh cheese" brands met the composition rules, since they were made from skimmed raw milk with 0.1% fat.
The agency says the real problem is how the two brands are named, and that the label doesn't tell buyers enough.
The agency says checks on dairy products and sample tests are up 20%.
Bogomil Nikolov from the consumer group Active Consumers said this is exactly the kind of product where buyers are most easily fooled into thinking they're getting real cheese. A kilogram of cheese has far more nutrients than unripened cheese, which holds 10-15% more water.
Nikolov said shoppers are misled on other products too. He pointed to lab tests on ayran that found large amounts of starch.
Simeon Karakolev, co-chair of the National Sheep and Goat Breeding Association, says Bulgaria's checks lag far behind Europe's. There, penalties for this kind of deception can include shutting a plant down, with fines running from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of euros.
Karakolev says anything that can't be sold in Europe ends up in Bulgaria because of low prices and weak checks along the chain, and this is wrecking the country's name as a maker of good food. "In this case, 40% of what we eat is pure junk," he said.
Industry groups say the lack of fines is the problem.