Fage moves HQ to Luxembourg

Breaking a tradition that has lasted nearly 100 years, the leading Greek dairy processor Fage is leaving its homeland and establishing headquarters in Luxembourg and changed its name to Fage International. Fage, market leader in Greece for yogurt where it now has over 25% of the market, and the fourth largest player in the US yogurt market, also produces cheeses (including Regato, Flair, Gouda Fage, Junior Portions) from its three Greek plants with main base Metamorfossi on the outskirts of Athens. Ice cream is a major product too, as are ESL and UHT milks and creams.

It is understood the company is moving to avoid continued registration in a Greece that could well fall out of the Eurozone, with all the financial implications this might have for an international concern. Fage (pronounced fa-yeh) is a family firm, still run by the founding Filippou dynasty which pioneered brands of Greek yogurt in its home country back in 1975. Five years later it started exporting its creamy, strained Greek yogurts to the UK and, in 1983, to Italy. By 1998 Fage had started selling on the US market – with what turned out to be electrifying success. Within six years of the first yogurt being sold there, the dairy was exporting 2000 tonnes per year from Greece to America. In 2008 a new Fage yogurt production plant was completed in Johnstown, New York state.

In the Greek cheese sector Fage (which translates as the imperative “Eat!”) pioneered producing brands aimed specifically at the children’s market with “Junior Portions” and “Junior Slices” – a fitting strategy for a company that started in 1926 with the slogan “We would never make a product that we would not give to our children”.