The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has identified Zarica cheese as one of the products with a huge potential to become protected. Today, Zarica is a real delicacy, the branding and survival of which domestic producers are fighting for.
Dairy ”Adra” from Brcko is one of them, which produces 2,000 pieces of this cheese per day under the Milcoop brand, and all of it is marketed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) the market. Here it has been made according to the traditional recipe for three years, in addition to the classic one, it is also made with the addition of garlic, pepper, chives and sudjuk pepper. The production process takes six days, but that’s why, as they say, the result is an indisputable taste of white smoked cheese whose quality can be compared to any other cheese in the world.
“We organized our local women and agreed on a recipe with them, experimented a bit and achieved what is characteristic of that cheese. We moved that into industrialization and brought it under the Haccp standard,” says Adis Rahman, owner of the dairy, for Agroklub.
Thus, under the control of nine workers, most of them local women, 10,000 pieces of cheese are produced weekly in “Adra”, which can be found in supermarkets throughout the country. Rahman told that he started the entire production with his own and loan funds, so far they have not participated in any financial support project or asked for incentives.
“When you have a good product, nice and high-quality, and you are guided by the policy that only what you are ready to buy and take home can go on the shelves, then it is not difficult to succeed,” added the interlocutor.
The owner of the dairy does not hide the fact that there is thepotential for further growth, and he revealed that there is great interest in other countries, primarily in Serbia, so now they are solving the procedure for obtaining an export number. Namely, the production capacity is about 5,000 pieces of cheese on a daily basis.
Homemade milk
Cheese is made from the milk of domestic producers. In the beginning, they had their own purchase stations, but as the market expanded, they began to purchase raw materials from legal entities for easier entry controls. In this way, this dairy buys about 15 tons of milk per week.
They came up with the very idea of starting production after realizing that no one works with this traditionally present product under controlled conditions and markets it. They decided to invest and combine it with all the standards that a dairy product should have, Akta reports.
E.Dz.
