A few months in the past, the cottage cheese at my native grocery retailer went lacking. After I requested the cashier in regards to the outage, she shrugged and mentioned, “It sells out fast.”
Undeterred, I started checking different shops, and was met by the identical destiny. The cottage cheese inventory, notably the Good Tradition model, was typically sparse or gone solely.
On-line, Good Tradition followers had been caught in the identical bind. “It’s just like the Starvation Video games making an attempt to get any,” considered one of them wrote on Reddit.
My curiosity was piqued: The place had all of the cottage cheese gone?
The cottage cheese squeeze, I’ve realized, comes from a confluence of developments in well being and meals manufacturing leaving grocery cabinets empty and stretching cottage cheese makers to their limits.
I’ve additionally realized how customers, annoyed by a meals system that they consider has profited from merchandise linked to poor well being outcomes, view deal-making within the trade with intense suspicion. Within the case of Good Tradition, some blamed the shortages on the model’s latest sale to a personal fairness agency.
Till just lately, cottage cheese had been dismissed as a soulless weight-reduction plan meals. Gross sales of the product peaked within the Nineteen Seventies, when the common American ate about 5 kilos of it per yr, based on the U.S. Division of Agriculture. However dairy producers started to refocus their processing capability on yogurt, which eclipsed cottage cheese gross sales by the mid-Nineteen Eighties.
A rising obsession with protein amongst American customers has given the white curds a brand new life. Just a few years in the past, on-line followers started posting about “protein-maxxing” with cottage cheese, including it to ice cream, smoothies, flatbreads, bagels and pasta dishes. TikTok creators turned cottage cheese converts, enticed by the product’s roughly 14 grams of protein per serving.
Gross sales grew to greater than $2 billion in 2025, an 82 % improve from the top of 2022, based on Circana, a market analysis agency based mostly in Chicago.
The trade can’t sustain with the demand.
Kevin Ellis, the chief government of Upstate Niagara Cooperative, a dairy firm with headquarters in Buffalo, mentioned producers weren’t ready for the resurgence.
“It was dying off,” Mr. Ellis mentioned. “Then TikTok made it a factor,” and gross sales took off “like a brush hearth.”
About three and a half years in the past, the cooperative’s cottage cheese product started to promote out. The corporate has needed to ration its provide for the 9 manufacturers it serves.
The cooperative is shifting ahead with its largest capital mission in its 61-year historical past — a $275 million funding to broaden manufacturing of its high-protein merchandise, together with cottage cheese, Greek yogurt and skyr, an Icelandic yogurt. The mission will push the corporate’s cottage cheese manufacturing to 90 million kilos per yr, up from 24 million.
In Wisconsin, the Westby Cooperative Creamery introduced it was present process a $14 million renovation to extend its cottage cheese capability to 24 million kilos per yr from 13.2 million. The corporate has since offered out of cottage cheese for the following three years, together with the extra capability.
A part of the problem of increasing provide is the complexity of creating the product. At Westby, culturing cottage cheese takes 16 hours. The corporate’s new renovation will improve its culturing vats, slicing the period of time to a still-lengthy eight hours.
At Good Tradition, a cottage cheese newcomer based mostly in Texas, gross sales income has roughly quadrupled prior to now three years. The corporate reached north of $200 million in retail gross sales in 2024.
“We’re servicing lower than 50 % of demand, as a result of we will’t sustain,” mentioned Jesse Merrill, a founder and the chief government of Good Tradition.
The concept to begin the enterprise got here to Mr. Merrill in 2015. He had just lately left a job in advertising at Trustworthy Tea, and his spouse, pregnant with their second baby, was hooked on cottage cheese. It was nutrient dense, however Mr. Merrill mentioned he “was horrified by the ingredient assertion,” which was stuffed with components that make meals last more or look higher.
He determined to remake the product with solely entire meals elements. “I noticed only a main alternative to modernize the model, give it a face-lift, reimagine the class,” Mr. Merrill mentioned.
In its first few years, Good Tradition’s gross sales chugged alongside steadily till Kenzie Akersa wellness influencer, posted a video to TikTok during which she made ice cream with the corporate’s cottage cheese. It went viral. Folks had been “freaking out” about his product, Mr. Merrill mentioned, and gross sales took off.
The upstart model is now working with seven processing crops and is within the technique of constructing two new crops of its personal.
In January, the corporate was acquired for $500 million by L Catterton, a personal fairness agency backed by the luxurious large LVMH.
Personal fairness cash is deep into the meals trade, investing in merchandise together with sandwiches (Jersey Mike’s) and occasional (Dunkin’). The L Catterton deal was the personal fairness agency’s first foray into shopping for a cottage cheese model.
After the sale, on-line commentators steered L Catterton could also be answerable for disruptions to the product’s provide and even its high quality.
Even my native grocery retailer proprietor was skeptical of the deal. “We haven’t had Good Tradition in about 6 months,” she mentioned in a textual content message after I requested in regards to the outage. “They offered to a personal fairness agency, and it’s been actually exhausting to get it.”
Shoppers are notably skeptical of bigger homeowners of health-conscious manufacturers, fearing they may introduce cost-cutting measures, like altering elements, which might result in sacrificing high quality and diet for revenue.
“Solely time will inform if it follows the developments of health-conscious meals promoting out,” Zephyr Zoidis, a journalist who tracks impartial manufacturers which have been purchased out, mentioned of the L Catterton deal in an Instagram publish.
Steve Younger, a managing accomplice on the funding agency Manna Tree, which invested in Good Tradition alongside L Catterton, mentioned these issues had been misguided.
“The second we decide within the quick time period to, , compromise our product requirements is the second we begin to drift into sameness, and that’s not one thing we are going to enable to occur,” he mentioned.
In a press release, L Catterton mentioned, “As we develop, our prime precedence is to proceed producing the identical high-quality product that our customers know and love.”
For Good Tradition, managing customers’ nervousness about its new homeowners has meant enjoying protection on TikTok, the place the corporate’s company account has left a path of feedback on movies claiming that one thing has modified in regards to the product since its acquisition.
Final month, a fan of the corporate posted a video discussing rumors that “Good Tradition bought purchased out, and so they modified the system” — a grievance she discovered exhausting to consider because the product was at all times out of inventory. At some point later, Good Tradition’s TikTok account commented that “the recipe you like continues to be the identical — similar elements, similar course of.”
“I simply wish to discover it in inventory!” she wrote again.
