“Dairy market companies have to innovate. Competition has increased in the last few years and I have seen an improvement in this department and producers started innovating,” says Catalina Aldea, retail management consultant.
“They moved from functional products to special products – for kids, then launched traditional products and goat milk products. An absolutely normal stage would be to cover the locally-sourced organic product segment.”
Catalina Aldea has a more than 15-year experience in retail and worked for Belgian-held retailer Mega Image for over 11 years.
Romania had nine certified organic dairy plants in 2014 compared with only three in 2007, the year it joined the European Union, ZF has found from Agriculture Ministry and Eurostat data.
The number of organic dairy companies may have gone up, but Romania still has a long way to go to catch up with countries like Italy, France, Spain or UK, which have hundreds of certified organic dairy companies. Italy ranks first in the EU in this respect, 440 plants in 2013, according to Eurostat. Last in this ranking are Malta, Cyprus, Slovenia and Poland, with fewer than six such plants each.
Romania is following the European healthy product trend, and several major dairy industry companies have introduced organic products. Whereas five or six years ago the organic products available in stores were all imported, now they have been almost completely replaced by yogurt, kefir and organic milk “made in Romania”.
Olympus, one of the top five dairy businesses in the industry, estimates the organic dairy segment to account for less than 1% of the local dairy market. It can therefore be put at less than EUR8 million to EUR10 million, as the entire (official) market amounts to some EUR1 billion, according to ZF calculations.
“Many dairy products are seen as staple foods eaten almost daily, therefore the higher price of organic products will not generate the same sales volumes as the regular dairy products. On the other hand, the local organic dairy products stand every chance of positioning themselves as lower priced than the imported organic dairy, which will create an opportunity for local producers and attract new customer segments that have a higher confidence in local production,” Catalina Aldea said.
The latest entry on the organic dairy market is FrieslandCampina Romania, the local branch of the Dutch group by the same name, which put Napoca-branded organic milk, yogurt, and kefir on store shelves.
FrieslandCampina works with 14 organic farms in Transylvania to be able to sell such products. Marketing manager Razvan Orbulescu says the reason for launching such products was the growing interest of Romanian consumers.
Olympus, which owns Fabrica de Lapte Brasov in Romania, entered the organic dairy product market in 2013, when it launched the first organic yogurt in Romania and a year later added organic kefir and milk.
Organic foods have mostly developed through specialist stores but they have entered supermarkets and hypermarkets in the last few years. French Lactalis group introduced the LaDorna organic milk brand, while Bistrita Nasaud-based Carmo-Lact sells the Monor organic kefir.
Albalact, too, has expressed interest in this market, as chief executive Stephane Batoux said at the beginning of the year that he might introduce organic products. Raraul SA, owned by Albalact, is a certified organic dairy company, according to Agriculture Ministry website.
The Agriculture Ministry data shows the certified organic dairy companies in 2014 were Dorna Lactate, Dorna SA (LaDorna), Carmo-Lact (Monor), Raraul SA, Mirdator Prod, Delaco Distribution and Fabrica de Lapte Brasov (Olympus).
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)