Dairy

The State Commission for Commodity Exchanges and Wholesale Markets in Bulgaria has reported a noteworthy 0.27% decline in the wholesale food price index over a span of two weeks, settling at 2.246 points compared to the pre-holiday figure of 2.252 points.

New Zealand farming giant Fonterra said on Sept. 1 that it plans to slash around $598 million in costs over the next seven years following a fall in global dairy prices.

Chief executive Miles Hurrell foreshadowed future job cuts, saying the "focus on efficiencies will have implications for staff numbers."

The amount of cow's milk collected by dairy enterprises increased by 2.4 percent in April compared with the same month of the previous year and increased by 3.5 percent in the January-April period compared with the same period of the previous year, according to data announced yesterday by the Turkish Statistical Agency (TÜİK).

Consumers are increasingly turning to private-label products at supermarkets, as food inflation remains high.

According to data, sellers' own products have seen their market share grow by as much as 6.6 percentage points compared to last year.

Farmers in several Serbian towns and cities will use their machinery to block roads until their demands for the state to improve their position are met, a representative of the Initiative for the Survival of Serbian Farmers, Djoka Curcic, said.

"The blockades will start this morning and will last several hours a day until our demands are fulfilled," Curcic told Beta news agency.

The price of the milk that dairy giant FAGE uses as a raw material in its factories in Greece and the US may have fallen by 36.8% and 15.3% respectively in the first quarter of 2023, but the prices at which the dairy industry sold its products increased on average in all the markets in which it operates by 15.5%.

The efforts of dairy companies to reduce the price of cow's milk to farmers at the same time as the price of it available on the "shelf" of supermarkets continues to rise, are brought to the fore by the Greek Holstein Breed Association and the Hellenic Livestock Association (SEK).

Raw milk production decreased by about 10 percent last October compared to the previous year due to the increased costs.

Due to the low selling price in the face of costs throughout 2022, the producers sent their milk-producing animals to slaughter.

Based in Kobarid in the north-west of the country, Mlekarna Planika is Slovenia's fourth largest dairy. What makes it special is that it sources all its milk locally, mostly from farms in the Alpine region of Posočje. Part of its success is that the farmers indirectly own the dairy through their cooperative.

What Dimitris and Michalis Sarantis know how to do well is to bring forgotten companies back to the forefront. It happened with Olympus. It happened with Rodopi. Will it happen with AGNO?

We will soon find out, as the Thessalian Hellenic Dairies group of the Sarantis brothers is soon to reintroduce the AGNO products to the Greek market.