Luxury cheese is being targeted by black market criminals

From the article:

The problem is only set to rise across the industry as cheese becomes more valuable. The overall price of food and non-alcoholic drinks in the UK rose around 25% between January 2022 and January 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics. Cheese, meanwhile, saw a similar price hike in the space of a single year.

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Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sanctions have been further tightened and the availability of certain food from the West has become even more limited, among them Scottish whisky and Norwegian salmon. At the same time, the black market in Russia for high-end foods from the EU has been growing.

“Cheese and wine are two of the most common products being transported illegally into Russia,” says Professor Chris Elliott, founder of the Global Institute for Food Security and a senior scientific advisor to the UN, “and there are sophisticated routes across Europe’s borders through Belarus and Georgia”.

Many Russians feel that the quality of local cheese doesn’t compare to banned foreign goods, so there is wide demand. Indeed, after the ban, some resorted to extreme measures – one man was caught attempting to drive into Russia from Poland with 460kg of banned cheese on the backseat of his car.

Since 2014, expensive and complex varieties of cheese from countries that were not previously known for their cheese have appeared on shop shelves, such as Belarusian camembert and parmesan. Some companies import European cheese to Belarus or other CIS countries, where the label is swapped so that it can be sold legally in Russian shops.

There were also reports of corner shops becoming black market cheese dealers.

Corruption makes the movement of sanction-busting food possible, says Prof Elliott. “So much money is involved that officials, including border guards, can be paid off. Sanctioned goods are bought and sold through digital networks and these online orders also make it into shops.”