Wow Denmark makes more cheese than The Netherlands? I’ll bedamned.
For the UK context, in 2024 we produced 821,000 tonnes in 2024 With a population estimate of 69,281,437 is 11.8KG/person.
Which is a lot lower than I expected, honestly.
~227g a week per person.
Even if we consider the lactose intolerant and those who don’t like cheese, that’s a pretty tough ration.
British cheese is a state secret, or, or…Monty Python was the truth.
This is accurate. I live in Finland and didn’t make any cheese that year
Well not anymore because you just provided data…
Finally someone posts some relevant data
WHAT!? This is a travesty. We can’t have those thrice cursed plastic brick stacking Danes out-cheesing us. Jan-Kees, rev up the whey separators. We have work to do.
You will never get this 🧀
plastic brick
Plot twist: Lego is not made out of plastic!
Cyprus soloing double Swiss output and yet have no cheese named for them. Half the size and double the output.
Did the maths for my own sake, so just in case anyone is interested, the UK was around 11.9 in 2024. Lower than I expected since we eat a ton of cheddar, but the UK’s population density is quite high and I guess we don’t export that much.
Besides Danablu cheese, most Danish cheese is pretty “safe” (bit boring). Unlike countries like France we (I happen to be a Danish dairy man) don’t use raw milk for cheese production because we had some bad listeria outbreaks some 100 years ago meaning all milk must be pasteurised, a law that went into effect in 1935. But that’s also why Danablu is a bit more interesting, as it only undergoes thermisation at 60°C for 1 minute instead of the usual at least 72-76°C/15sec.
Anyway, it’s a lot of Danbo and Havarti, nothing too exciting.I’m actually more interested to see Estonia on the map, I didn’t know their game
Estonian here. We just make and eat many metric fucktonnes of generic ass semi-hard sliced cheese we put on our sandwiches. It’s mild, but good. Also melted cheese spread is probably more popular than butter or margarine for sandwich lubrication purposes. And of course cream cheese is pretty popular too.
Does quark count for this map? I recently learned that’s called “curd cheese” not “curd” like I previously thought. That’s also kind of a national dish tbh. We put it in kohuke and everyone loves kohuke.
But we pretty much just make a bit of everything as far as I know, no real specialties that you’d want to try specifically from Estonia I think. Mostly we just steal everyone else’s stuff. You can buy knockoff parm, tilsiter, havarti.
The only thing that actually originates from Estonia is sõir I think, kind of a poor man’s mozzarella (some similarities in the process, but not the same thing), made by peasants because only the manor lords could get real cheese.
I’m actually more interested to see Estonia on the map, I didn’t know their game
Same. Their population is small though. Just over a million I think.
By far most exported French cheese is also made with pasteurised milk.
I’m surprised that Italy and Greece are relatively low because cheeses like Parmigiano Reggiano or feta are protected designations of origin, so at least in the EU every Parmigiano is from Italy and every feta is from Greece. Additionally I’m quite surprised about Switzerland because they are renowned for their Swiss cheese.
Parm is expensive. I can go buy a ton of “Valio forte juust” or “Coop itaaliapärane kõva juust” (“Italian style hard cheese”, probably comes from Valio too tbh) at a quarter of the price and it tastes pretty much the same, they just can’t use the name. So I don’t think genuine parm sells very well with non-billionaires.
Feta apparently can only be made from free range sheep and goat milk, with at least 70% of it being sheep milk. Much harder to make a ton of than anything made of cow milk in factory farms.
Swiss cheese is deceptive because it’s full of holes, just like buying a bag of chips that’s full of air.
Source: I’m half Dutch
Left or right half?
Bottom half
surely the front half
Links natuurlijk
This is cheese produced, not money made. Cheap cheese will drown all others in volume.
It’s cheese per capita. There are fewer Danes than there are Italians or Greeks. My heuristic take is that Italy and Greece do produce more cheese than Denmark.
Italy has about ten times as many people as Denmark, so it will be producing more cheese in total than Denmark according to this map. Greece actually isn’t that much more populous, a little less than twice as many people than Denmark, so Greece would need to be making about twice as much cheese as it does to catch up with the Danes
Maybe Italy just has a small number of “Cheese Whales”.
feta is from Greece
In Hungary we have white cheese that is essentially the same, but does not have the feta label. I’d imagine not many would pay for the Feta name.
ok but most of it tastes nasty
source: dutch
Didn’t you guys invent the literal best thing in the world, smoked cheese?
If you don’t like cheese then you’re not truly Dutch.
Source: een kaaskop
My German friend was just telling me yesterday how he makes smoked cheeses as a side hustle and sells them to Sweden and Estonia. With this title, I had to do a double take.
I find it interesting because Estonia already makes a ton of smoked cheeses. Hard and soft, made with alder or juniper wood, etc.
Jesus Christ, the Danes could literally 1:1 model their entire population out of cheese (presuming they weigh about the human average of ~75kg) and have some to spare!
For any USians interested in doing the math, here’s some data to start with (in millions of pounds). And with the obligatory caveat that nothing is being claimed about quality.
Wild that I don’t see more Danish cheese everywhere. Share some ya darn dairy Viking yahoos.
Denmark also has a pretty small population compared to the countries we often think of as big cheese producers like France and Italy. Even if Danes are making three or four times as much cheese per person, there are ten times as many Italians as there are Danes so there’s still more Italian cheese overall
I wonder if Edam is a big factor here
I think a lot is being exported but I don’t actually know.
If it’s not a lot exported that would be pretty weird. I don’t know how much cheese you eat but 200g a day is a lot.
Certainly eat less than 200g a day myself on average, but if someone paid me a million euros to eat half a kilo per day every day for a year, I’d have no problem getting it done. An entire kilo might get difficult but still doable I reckon
Yeah, there is a fair amount of Danish cheese in German supermarkets.
