The Cottage Cheese Shortage Is Back. Carrefour Saw an Opportunity.

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-07-21 · 5 min read

16.2% — How much Carrefour raised the price of Tera cottage cheese at some of its branches in June 2026, in the middle of a real Tnuva shortage — more than five times the 2.9% hike the manufacturer itself announced, per Ynet

June 2026: supermarket shelves are running out of cottage and white cheese, a technical fault at Tnuva has created a real shortage, and manufacturers announce modest price hikes ahead of the Shavuot holiday. In the middle of it, one chain discovers that nobody is really checking — and raises its price far beyond what the dairy itself asked for. The story got fixed within days, thanks to journalism. The more interesting question is what happens on all the other days, when nobody's looking.

What actually happened: a plant malfunction, and cottage cheese disappears from the shelf

Per Calcalist (July 5, 2026), the shortage traces back to a fault in the automated warehouse control system (Dematic) at Tnuva's Alon Tavor dairy — a fault that had persisted for over a month, because fixing it requires technicians from abroad who are avoiding travel to Israel due to the security situation. In the meantime, the plant is running on manual handling that can't keep up with demand; a senior executive at a major retail chain quoted in the piece said, "we're receiving only about 80% of the order we placed, and the dairies say there are allocations, to allow supply to the entire market." Unusually high demand over Passover and Shavuot, when many Israelis stayed home instead of traveling abroad, made things worse.

Against that backdrop, Tera and Strauss announced modest price increases ahead of the holiday — Tera by 2.9%, Strauss by just 1.2%. Tnuva, for its part, announced no increase on its cottage cheese at all.

Who moved fastest to charge more: Carrefour's 16.2% jump

That's where the chains come in. Per Ynet (June 14, 2026), Carrefour — formerly branded Yenot Bitan — raised the price of Tera cottage cheese at some of its sub-chains (Carrefour Market and Carrefour Market Mehudarot) by 16.2%, from ₪6.80 to ₪7.90 a cup — more than five and a half times the increase the manufacturer itself had announced. At the same branches, Strauss cottage cheese also got pricier, by as much as 12.9% in some locations. A separate chain, Super Bareket, raised Tera cottage cheese by 5.8% (from ₪6.90 to ₪7.30) and Strauss by 1.4%. Some chains even raised the price of Tnuva cottage cheese — even though the dairy itself hadn't touched its price at all.

Not every chain behaved this way: per the same report, Osher Ad, Tiv Taam, Rami Levy (in its physical stores) and Shufersal held prices steady or cut them. Ynet notes that the episode recalls the summer of 2011, when a cottage cheese cup that hit ₪8 helped ignite that year's major cost-of-living protests.

The partial fix — and only after getting caught

After Ynet's report ran, Carrefour scrambled to respond. Per the follow-up piece (June 16, 2026), the chain lowered the online price of Strauss and Tera cottage cheese from ₪7.90 to ₪7.10 — still above the original prices (₪7.00 and ₪6.90, respectively), so only a partial correction. At physical "Carrefour Market" branches, meanwhile, the price stayed put at ₪7.90, unchanged. In other words: the original hike only got corrected where the press kept watching.

The government's fix: more imported cheese, just like 2023

Meanwhile, on the government side, the response to the shortage is expanded imports. Per Bizzness (July 6, 2026), the Ministry of Economy's Quota Committee published an additional duty-free quota of 3,000 tons of yellow cheese, valid through the end of 2026, with applications due by July 26 — capped at a retail price of ₪4 per 100 grams in chain stores and ₪4.5 elsewhere. It's an expansion of an earlier 5,503-ton quota, of which about 3,187 tons have been imported so far, at prices around ₪3-3.5 per 100 grams.

The problem: this isn't the first time cheese import quotas have been supposed to bring shelf prices down. Per an investigation by Walla Finance (January 20, 2026), in the three years between January 2023 and January 2026 — the period the original cheese-import reform was in effect — several leading imported cheese lines actually got sharply more expensive: European Emmental (Machlevot Europe) at Rami Levy — up 169%; Danablue (Tnuva/Willifood) at Yohananof — up 74%; Bulgarian cheese (Eurocheese) — up 68%; Tzfatit and goat feta (Zru'al farm) — up 64% each; cheddar (Machlevot Gad) — up 46%. Dr. Hezi Gur-Mizrahi, who ran the check, argued the reform lacked an enforcement mechanism to make sure the added competition actually reached consumers. In other words: the next import quota might bring prices down — but the last one, on at least several products, didn't.

What Superclear's own data shows

We checked today's Superclear data (scanned July 21, 2026) on an easy-to-track national cottage cheese line: Tnuva's 9% badatz cup — a single, identical item code, not one of the specific products flagged in the news coverage, but from the same manufacturer's cottage line — sold in 1,262 stores we track. At Osher Ad, the cheapest chain on Superclear's overall index (23 of the 24 branches we track), the price sits at ₪5.90. At Zol U'Begadol ("cheap and in bulk") — a chain whose very name promises low prices — it's a flat, uniform ₪6.90 across all 34 of its branches. That's about a 17% gap on the exact same product, on an item the manufacturer didn't touch this year at all.

What's more telling: despite that higher cottage cheese price, Zol U'Begadol actually ranks as a relatively cheap chain overall on Superclear's index — 7% below the national median, rank 21 of 33. And Carrefour itself, the chain that pushed cottage cheese up 16.2%, sits just 2% above the median overall — rank 10 of 33, labeled "average." The blunt hike wasn't a symptom of a systemically expensive chain; it was a one-off call on a single shortage-squeezed item, corrected only partially and only after the press turned a spotlight on it.

The bottom line

A genuine shortage, caused by a technical fault the chains had no control over, is a natural opening to charge more — and at least one chain took it, by a margin well beyond what the manufacturer itself asked for. The government's proposed fix, another duty-free import quota, has already been tried on other cheeses before — and per a January check, it didn't always translate into lower shelf prices. And in the meantime, with no shortage in the headlines and no scandal at all, the price of that exact same cottage cheese cup still varies by about 17% between chains — a gap that exists every day, not just when someone happens to check.

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