The $2.3 Billion Cheese War: Why the E.U. Is Trying to Ban American Parmesan Around the World

Exports are at a record high, but American cheese makers are facing down E.U. lawyers.

BY AMAYA NICHOLE, NEWS WRITER

Can Parmesan originate outside Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region? The fourth-generation cheesemakers running Wisconsin’s Sartori think so, and they have the sweet, nutty wheels of cheese to prove it.

The European Union disagrees, regardless of the Sartori family’s craft and Italian heritage. And it’s attempting to enforce its geographical indication rules—the laws that, for example, state that Champagne wine can come only from Champagne, France—in export markets beyond the E.U. borders that are worth billions.

There are no clear rules, however, for when a place name or traditional descriptor attached to a product crosses over into generic territory. Most people agree that cheddar, for instance, long ago shed its geographic ties to Cheddar, England, and became simply a style of cheese.

Feta is one of the more contested cases. To Americans, it is a crumbly cheese available from any producer, while the E.U. maintains that it can come only from a specific region of Greece with millennia of cheesemaking tradition behind it.

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The current administration has been using trade deals to advance America’s stance on generic food names, with notable success. Malaysia, Argentina, and Taiwan are among the governments that have committed to allowing U.S. companies to sell their cheeses under familiar, widely recognized names.

However, it hasn’t been without pushback from Consorzio—an Italian trade organization that unites mostly wine, food, and agricultural producers. The group’s president, Nicola Bertinelli, said the issue was transparency for cheese consumers. “Consumers may believe they are purchasing a product linked to a specific Italian origin and production method, when in fact they are not,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The financial stakes behind that argument are significant, as Consorzio estimated last year that sales of what it calls “fake Parmesan” outside the E.U. exceeded €2 billion, or about $2.3 billion, annually.

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