GERMANY – Rapid growth in the German Mozzarella market has encouraged Italian firm Francia to invest heavily in the market.

Over the last ten years, sales of Mozzarella in Germany have seen double-digit growth every year. This year’s hot summer also boosted demand for the cheese, mainly used for salads and pizzas, which has seen sales increase by 11.3% for the first six months of 2003.

The only other cheeses to beat this performance were Feta with 17.8% growth, and fondue cheese, which grew by 15.3%. Estimated Mozzarella sales in Germany last year were just short of 14,000 tonnes.

Italy’s third-largest Mozzarella producer, Francia, has now decided to go all out in a bid to take a bigger share of the booming market.

However, when planning its expansion, the company faced a problem in the logistics of shipping the cheese north from the sites of the Francia dairies in Rome and Naples.

The owners of the company, brothers Alcao, Antonio and Giovanni Francia, found that the best solution to the problem would be to move a portion of production right into the heart of the main export market.

The result of that move is that Francia now has a production capacity of 200,000kg a day at its Mozzarella production plant at Tempelhof, Berlin.

The plant, which has been running tests since June of this year, is not only said to be the largest Mozzarella production facility in Europe, but also the most modern, and so far has cost