What should the cheese industry worry about more than a technical "stuck neck"?

Wen | reporter Li Yuxi of the Financial National Weekly

"Just like instant coffee first entered China, the emergence of re-made cheese and cheese snacks has cultivated the Chinese people's awareness of cheese, and China's consumer market is being cultivated." As a representative of China's local handmade original cheese, Liu Yang, founder of Böhler Cheese and chairman of the World Cheese Guild China, also had to admit the important value of remade cheese to the current Chinese cheese market.

In the past few years, driven by the reproduction of cheese, the Chinese cheese market is showing double growth. However, under the momentum of the boom, the cheese industry also has hidden concerns.

As an imported product, China's cheese industry not only lags behind the developed dairy countries in terms of cheese culture and history, but also relies on imports in terms of core equipment and raw materials for cheese production. At the same time, due to the limited domestic milk source resources, production costs remain high, and China's cheese industry is also controlled abroad at the raw material end.

In the context of China's ecological civilization construction, the total amount of animal husbandry is controlled, and it is unrealistic for domestic dairy industry to rely entirely on domestic production. In this case, what kind of road should China's cheese industry take?

Cheese is scientifically known as cheese, and milk, rennet and starter culture are important raw materials for cheese in the production process.

Zhang Shuyi, a researcher at the National Animal Husbandry Station, told the "Finance and Economics National Weekly" reporter that although the domestic research on rennet and starter culture has been carried out, and there are some related scientific research results, the commercial conversion rate is poor, the product stability is insufficient, and the real implementation of commercial production of rennet and leavening agent still needs to be imported.

Chai Xuan, founder and chairman of Miaoke Lando, also told this reporter that there is still a big gap between the current average cheese consumption in Chinese compared with Western countries, and the development history of the modern cheese industry is relatively short, so the raw materials, processing equipment, core technologies, etc. of domestic remanufactured cheese production need to learn from foreign development experience.

The reporter's investigation found that in the process of remanding cheese, although some machinery can already achieve local machinery substitution, the production effect of local products in core technology areas such as melting pots still cannot reach the international advanced technology level.

However, Chen Yuhua, founder and CEO of Dr. Cheese, believes that at present, in the process of remaking cheese, it is an indisputable fact that many core technologies need to rely on imports, but with the continuous rise of the domestic cheese consumption market, it is believed that the development of localization equipment and raw materials will be very rapid, and localization can be fully realized in the future.

Figure/Figureworm Creative

In fact, compared with the localization problem in the technical field, the localization and development of the cheese industry is more difficult to solve the problem of original cheese.

The industry generally believes that the production process of original cheese is simple and there is no high threshold, and the "hurdle" in front of the development of original cheese in China is the high price of milk.

Cheese is also known as "milk gold" in the industry, and the nutritional value of cheese is higher than that of liquid milk. At the same time, the production cost of cheese is also quite high, usually 10 pounds of milk can make 1 pound of cheese.

Some industry insiders and reporters have calculated such an account, the price of foreign cheese futures is about 3500-4000 US dollars / ton, plus tariffs, exchange rates and other conversions, the landed price of cheese is 40,000 yuan / ton, that is, 20 yuan / jin. Compared with China's domestic, the average purchase price of milk is close to 5 yuan / kg.

From the price point of view, domestic production of original cheese is not competitive in the market. On the other hand, because China's cheese consumption has just risen in the past one or two years, and consumption is mainly concentrated in the re-made cheese sector, it is difficult for the production of original cheese to form a consumption pull, and the willingness of enterprises is not strong.

Even leaving aside the price issue, there is a very high threshold for high-quality cheese making. Liu Yang said that although the production of cheese seems simple, it integrates the grasp of the environment such as temperature and humidity, as well as the grasp of different flavor performance, which requires long-term accumulation and exploration, and cannot be completed simply by relying on technology.

Interviewed experts and business people generally believe that compared with foreign dairy industry developed countries, China's dairy farming in forage, pasture and other aspects of resources do not dominate, domestic milk sources are limited and the price is high. Moreover, the environmental burden caused by dairy farming is relatively heavy, under the requirements of ecological civilization construction, China's large-scale dairy farming, completely in the upstream of the industrial chain, completely achieve the original cheese autonomy is unrealistic.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, China's fresh milk (raw milk) output was 32.01 million tons, and the output of dairy products was 27.194 million tons. According to the data of Zhiyan Consulting, in recent years, the annual consumption of dairy products in China equivalent to the number of fresh milk has exceeded 40 million tons, of which about 49.09 million tons of fresh milk in 2019. It can be seen that there is a large gap between the domestic production and supply of fresh milk (and dairy products) and consumer demand.

It is worth mentioning that according to the total population of the same period, the per capita consumption of fresh milk in 2019 is about 35 kg, which is still a long way from the average of 100 kg of fresh milk consumption in the world. This also means that in the case of the total amount of livestock remaining unchanged, with the growth of domestic dairy consumption in the future, the gap in China's milk source will continue to expand.

Liu Chao, vice chairman of the China Dairy Industry Association, believes that although there is still a gap between China and dairy developed countries in the field of cheese production and processing, cheese will not have the problem of "stuck neck", because the world dairy industry is the in-depth integration and development of "you have me, I have you".

In his view, combined with the price of milk sources in China and the requirements of ecological civilization construction, in the case of limited total development of animal husbandry and limited domestic milk sources, we need to rationally use international resources and make a fuss in the processing link.