Ireland’s Glanbia Foods will begin producing organic cheeses for the US market, in order to capitalise on a predicted 20% annual growth in this region.

The cheese maker plans to produce eight to 10 million pounds of organic cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack cheeses over the next 12 months. “We have been tracking the organic market for a number of years and we could see that there will be about a 20 percent annual growth in the organic cheese market,” says Jeff Williams, CEO of Glanbia Foods. “Organic cheese production is usually isolated to smaller businesses, so we think that our size can bring resources such as quality control and assurance to the table.”
Glanbia’s size will also give it a competitive advantage by providing it with the ability to bring costs and prices down in a market that is dominated by smaller and more costly producers of organic cheese. However, the cheese maker might be limited in the quantity of organic cheese that it can currently produce because of the scarcity of local organic milk.