The difficulty to find cheese in China

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We know that French are really attached to some values of their gastronomy like for example wine, dry sausage or cheese. The stereotypes about French people are thus mostly true.

When French travel abroad for different reasons, for tourism or for business, it is really hard for them to find products which represent their cuisine especially in countries where the culture is really different (Asian countries, emerging countries).

If we now look closely to the cheese, we see that there is two ways of see the situation. Either the cheese is simply not available in supermarkets that is the case for India for example, either it is possible to find French cheese but the prices are expensive. We can take here the example of China where the French cheese is mainly in hypermarkets such as Carrefour. A last alternative is to order directly online via online supermarkets which develop themselves slowly and which propose a wide range of cheese at reasonable prices (click here for more information).

The reasons of the difficulty to find cheese are pretty obvious. It is because of cultural differences concerning the gastronomy between China and France. Even if we can think that the globalization brings a lot of news things in many countries, the main culinary trends of chinese people will be slow to change because the ways of consumption are different.

The market is here 

We note, however, some progress, with some cheese in food fairs and if we analyze the figures we see that the cheese market is booming. Indeed, there is a growth of 22% for the year 2012. Countries that export their most cheese are New Zealand, Australia and the United States. France, is behind but catching up her lateness. Be careful though concerning the different food scandals that have hit China in recent times, cheese requires optimal storage conditions and improper storage of it may cause diseases.

Just as it was the case for the wine, it is important to educate the palate of Chinese to help them discover this rather unusual product. The Chinese will not necessarily love at first sight. There are different types of cheeses from different countries. Some French cheeses are very strong and it may not be to start with them. Again, if we were to draw a parallel with the wine, you could say it is beginning to emerge several experts from French cheese and abroad to introduce Chinese in the manufacturing process but also to the taste.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese