Dairy makers have concluded that white brined cheese made the traditional way cannot cost less than €11 a kilogram. Cheaper cheese contains more water, a study by the Active Consumers Association shows.
The association studied products from the "Basket with Care" initiative. Chains also sell cheeses with an undeclared water content of over 60%.
Traditional white brined cheese is 46% dry matter and 54% water. A production director at a dairy firm said only cheese with those figures is a traditional Bulgarian product. In his view, anything else should not be called Bulgarian white brined cheese.
About 5 litres of milk make 800 grams of cheese. Bulgarian raw milk is bought at 55 to 60 cents a litre.
The firm has its own shop, where a kilogram of cheese costs €11.90 and 400 grams cost €4.70. By the firm's calculation, the same products cost about 15% more in the chains.
The firm's commercial director called the chains a partner. He said the firm cannot deliver a small amount of cheese to a single buyer, in Dobrich for example. Chains and shops are also found in mid-sized towns.
One shopper, who regularly buys fresh milk, yoghurt, kashkaval and cheese, checks that products meet BDS, the Bulgarian state standard. She wants real, good-quality cheese because the difference shows in the taste. Another shopper said it matters to her that the product really is genuine.
Dimitar Zorov of the Association of Dairy Processors gave one main reason for the poor quality: pressure on producers to cut prices while mark-ups rise.
Bogomil Nikolov says the problem and the whole chain should be looked at together. In his view, it should be judged whether subsidies are unfair to processors and traders, because that is also part of the problem Zorov describes.