Four Israeli dairies won a total of 15 medals in the annual international Mondial du Fromage cheese competition in the city of Tours, France earlier this month.
Almost 1,900 cheeses were presented to a jury of nearly 320 international professionals on Sep. 14-16, according to the competition’s website.
Organized together with the International Cheesemongers Guild, the competition is “an opportunity to showcase expertise, respect for traditions, strive for excellence and demonstrate creativity and innovation.”
The Israeli dairies—Gvinage, Hanan Hagaban, Flora and Hanoked Dairy Farm—won between them four gold medals, five silver and six bronze.
Noémie Richard-Stein, a leading figure in the global cheese industry, relocated to Israel’s north from London during the coronavirus pandemic, and together with her husband, Richard, manages the Gvinage dairy at Rom Farm on Mount Kammon, Ynet reported.
“The competition is between specific cheeses, by category, so that a cheese from a small dairy on Mount Kammon can find itself competing against cheeses from the most renowned dairies in the world,” Richard-Stein told Ynet.
She went on to remark that “fortunately, the International Cheesemongers Guild is not against Israel and does not mix politics into it. Their agenda is that the geopolitical situation should not affect the work of the cheesemaker,” she added.
Once a stock broker in Ramat Gan, Hanoked dairy founder Danny Barzilai decided with his spouse in 1980 to move to the communal town of Gilon in the Northern Galilee and raise sheep and goats, according to the report. He studied cheese-making in a prestigious school in France in the 1990s.
Since 2019, his dairy has won 23 medals in various international tournaments.
“The medals we won at the World Cheese competition, a global contest in Portugal in which we participated in November 2024, we dedicated to the memory of Dror Or, of blessed memory, our dear friend who was murdered in [Kibbutz] Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023. We felt a profound sense of meaning in representing our country during such a time,” he told Ynet.
In total, Gvinage won two gold medals and two bronze; Hanan Hagaban won a gold medal and two silver medals; Flora one gold, three silver and one bronze; and Hanoked Dairy farm one silver and four bronze.
In 2024 over 1.56 billion liters of cow’s milk were produced in Israel, along with about 22 million liters of sheep’s milk, according to data from the Israel Dairy Board.
The average Israeli consumes about 154 liters of milk and dairy products per year, including about 24 pounds of soft cheeses per person—ranking the highest in the world—and about 10 pounds of hard cheeses per person annually.
