Cormac Nolan, Consumer Insight Specialist, Bord Bia - The Irish Food Board
China’s continuing rapid industrialisation, economic growth and adoption of western style diets is creating opportunity for ingredient supply.
This is nowhere more the case than in the rapid rise of pizza in China’s major cities, and increasingly its more remote regions too.
According to research conducted for Bord Bia, China today has over 4,000 dedicated pizza restaurants, and that is going to grow to over 6,000 by the end of 2020.
That growth necessitates a significant amount of cheese, cheese that China does not have the capacity to produce domestically. For pizza, the opportunity is in mozzarella but also in cheddar which is often further processed in China for pizza topping.
New Zealand is the dominant supplier of cheese, particularly mozzarella, to China currently and has been for the last decade. In 2018, New Zealand was the source for 61% of all of China’s fresh cheese import. As the pizza industry continues to expand in China and New Zealand producers come under increasing stress about the environmental headroom they have for further expansion, there is opportunity for European suppliers, including Ireland to take share of that market.
This is even more so the case when looking at the US share of the market, who in 2018 were suppliers of 10,000 tonnes of cheese to China. The trade war with the US has resulted in tariffs of 25% being applied to US exports, making their product significantly less competitive in the marketplace.
Irish dairy companies are already investigating the possibilities in the pizza sector. This makes sense, particularly as it is one which will experience significant growth in the coming years, and one where competitor nations are suffering some limitations in ability to supply.