The Dutch are used to eating cheese every day, but soaring costs are turning it into a hard-to-get luxury item

• The Dutch are well known for their love of cheese, but increasing prices have hit households hard.
• The price increases have been driven by rising costs and supply issues.
•  Insider spoke with people in the industry about the effects this has had.

The Dutch have a long and well documented love for cheese. Julius Caesar even mentioned it in 57 BC in his account of the Gallic Wars, "Bellum Gallicum." 

Cheese also appears in many Dutch sayings. You can refer to Dutch people as "kaaskoppen," or cheese heads. If a Dutch person tells you that "you haven't eaten cheese" of something, it means that you don't understand it.

But rising costs and supply issues have led to cheese becoming more expensive, which has hit the cheese-loving nation hard and has forced residents to cut back on a food item they're used to eating every day.

By the beginning of the 21st century, there were 300 cheese farms in the Netherlands.

The latest data from the Dutch dairy supply-chain organization ZuivelNL indicated that the Netherlands produced 963,000 metric tons of cheese in 2020, two-thirds of which it exported. 

But the Dutch also consume a large amount of cheese domestically. In 2020, the Dutch consumed about 26 kilograms, which is about 57 pounds, of cheese per capita, the ZuivelNL report said. That's why the price increases over the past year have been so hard on Dutch households.

Tuncay Özgüner, the head of Zijerveld, which is a subsidiary of FrieslandCampina, said cheese prices have risen 30% to 40% from a year ago. 

FrieslandCampina is one of the top 10 largest dairy producers globally, and it's responsible for more than half of Dutch cheese production.

"Right now a kilo of unprocessed cheese costs 5 euros. Last year it was 3 euros," Özgüner said of Gouda cheese, a yellow cow's milk cheese that's one of the most popular types of cheese in the Netherlands and the most exported. 

The price increase is driven by a number of things, Özgüner said. "On the farm everything is getting more expensive: livestock, people's wages, energy. That all leads to more expensive cheese," he said.

There's also a relatively low supply of milk, which has driven up the price of the most important ingredient in cheese.

For one kilo of cheese you need 10 liters of milk. Last year, a liter of milk cost 35 cents, but the price has now risen to 50 cents. So the price of a kilo of cheese has risen 1.50 euros through the cost of milk alone.

One of the reasons behind the low supply of milk is the environmental policy in the Netherlands, Özgüner said. 

A lot of Dutch farmers are being bought out by the government in a bid to reduce pollution, The Guardian reported. 

"Less farmers means less milk, and that drives up prices," Özgüner said. 

Spokespeople from both FrieslandCampina and Albert Heijn, which is one of the largest supermarket chains in the Netherlands, said they hadn't seen less demand for cheese despite the steep price increases. 

"The demand is still strong and growing," Özgüner said. "People stay true to their preferences. There's no big shift going on. Cheese is an essential part of people's diet, not a luxury good. It's just like toothpaste. You need it."

In Amsterdam, at the Dappermarkt cheese vendor Kees Kaas, Anne-Lynn Dietz sells 200 kilos of Gouda each week. 

Dietz said that her cheese had recently gone up in price from 12 euros to 13 euros per kilo, but that she hadn't noticed any long-term shift in consumer preferences. 

"When cheese becomes more expensive, people panic and buy cheaper cheeses or smaller amounts. But once they realize that prices have gone up at all the other places, they go back to their old habits," Dietz said.

Joeri Bos, the owner of Wereldse Kaas van Klaas, another market stand at the Dappermarkt, said the store sells 600 kilos of cheese per week.

"We have recently raised our prices and are going to increase them more in the coming month. We've seen that certain customers have stopped coming to the shop altogether because of this or buy in smaller quantities," Bos said.

IRI Nederland, a company that gathers data on buying behavior, said that in the first four months of the year, the volume of cheese sold in the Netherlands dropped by 6% while the prices went up by 6%.

It said that the end of the COVID-19 restrictions may have also played a part in this, with people consuming less cheese now than during the restrictions.