Israel Opened a Duty-Free Cheese Quota to Undercut Tnuva's Near-Monopoly. This Summer, the Ministry Itself Approved a 30% Higher Price For It.

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-08-13 · 4 min read

75% — the gap Superclear's own data finds on one identical 1-kilogram bag of sliced yellow cheese — same barcode, same 'City Market' chain — between a branch in Pardes Hanna-Karkur (₪39.90) and one in Holon (₪69.90); meanwhile the specific duty-free 'Euro Cheese' import tied to the state's quota holds at exactly the ₪3.20-per-100g price importers committed to, wherever our data finds it on shelf (Superclear data, August 2026)

In December 2025, Israel's Ministry of Economy handed out duty-free licenses to import 5,900 tons of yellow cheese — a quota built, on paper, to chip away at Tnuva's roughly 90% grip on the category (Walla Finance). Importers and chains competed for slices of it by promising rock-bottom shelf prices: Osher Ad at ₪3.00 per 100 grams, an importer called Euro Dairy at ₪3.10-3.20, Rami Levy at ₪3.10-3.50, a company called Neto Malinda at ₪3.40 — each roughly half of what Israel's leading yellow-cheese brands cost on the shelf (Globes).

Eight months later, on July 6, 2026, the same ministry approved an additional 3,000-ton duty-free tranche — and raised the price ceiling that comes with it. The new ceiling is ₪4 per 100 grams inside participating supermarket chains and ₪4.5 at other retail points such as neighborhood grocers and kiosks, up from the original ₪3.0-3.5 band: roughly a 30% jump, as Calcalist put it plainly in its headline — the ministry "approves importers hiking the price." The ministry framed it as reach, not retreat: extending the cheap cheese beyond the roughly 600 retail points it currently reaches and into smaller neighborhood stores. By its own count, only 3,187 tons of the original quota had actually been imported by the time the new tranche was approved.

What already went wrong with round one

The ministry's framing skips over what had already happened to round one's prices. A Walla Finance investigation from January 2026 found several of the duty-free cheeses had climbed far past what importers promised, once shoppers stopped actively comparing: an Emmental sold by Rami Levy up 169%, a Danish-blue-style cheese from Willi Food up 74% at Yohananof, a Bulgarian-style cheese branded Eurocheese up 68%. "Once the consumer got used to the imported products and stopped actively comparing," the piece argued, "every player in the market realized it could raise prices." The reform, it noted, came with no price-monitoring mechanism and no published measure of success.

The broader cheese aisle backs that up. A May 2026 survey of nine chains' deli counters, run by the Institute for Retail Research, found a 45.4% gap between the cheapest and priciest basket of 15 weighed cheese products — Bulgarian cheese ranging ₪29-59 a kilo, semi-hard mozzarella ₪50-99. A separate Maariv analysis from June 2026 found dairy prices outside the government's price-controlled staples list up 36.5% on average over six months, and as much as 72% on individual items; one Bulgarian cheese it cited went from ₪16.26 to ₪27.90. Its point: Israel's price control reaches only a defined list of basics, so cheese sold a few centimeters over on the same shelf can climb largely unwatched.

What Superclear's own data shows

We checked what all of this looks like in our own price index, built from the chains' statutory transparency files rather than a one-time survey. One sliced-cheese product carrying the "Euro Cheese" import branding sells, as of our latest scan, for exactly ₪12.80 per 400 grams — ₪3.20 per 100 grams, matching almost to the agora what importers committed to under the original tender — at Yohananof, Super Sapir, Shuk HaIr and Salach Dabach, and for as little as ₪10.90 at Machsanei HaShuk. Four of those five — Yohananof and Salach Dabach in Superclear's "very cheap" band, Machsanei HaShuk and Shuk HaIr in the "cheap" band — undercut the national median; the fifth, Super Sapir, sits almost exactly at it. Where the duty-free cheese shows up in our data, the promise mostly holds.

But it only shows up at those five. It doesn't turn up under any matching barcode in our current data for Osher Ad or Rami Levy, even though both were named as tender winners — most likely because each retailer prices its own allocation under its own private-label barcode, with no shared code that a shopper, or a price index, can follow from chain to chain. There's no public list tying a specific product on a specific shelf back to the tender that created it.

The rest of the cheese aisle moves independently of any of this. A one-kilogram bag of Rich-brand sliced yellow cheese, 27% fat — a single barcode, sold under the same "City Market" sign nationwide — costs ₪39.90 at a branch in Pardes Hanna-Karkur and ₪69.90 at a branch in Holon: a 75% gap on the identical product, from the identical chain. Whatever a duty-free quota is meant to fix, it was never built to touch that.

What it means for shoppers

The duty-free cheese is real, and where our data can see it, it's priced close to what was promised. But finding it takes knowing which five or six chains actually carry it — nothing on the label ties it back to a government program, and the ministry's July decision widens the door to more retailers while quietly raising what they're allowed to charge, months after reporters had already documented the previous ceiling being ignored. For everything else on the cheese shelf — most of it — there's no ceiling at all, and Superclear's own numbers show prices moving by tens of percent on the exact same product, in the exact same chain, for no reason a shopper standing in the aisle could ever see.

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