Spaniards drink little milk. And they don’t eat too much yogurt either (although they do eat other dairy products such as smoothies or ice cream). And this drop in consumption, which has been occurring for a few years now, has been one of the triggers for a multinational like Danone to adopt drastic restructuring measures. Among them, the closure of the Parets del Vallès plant, announced this Friday, where the Oikos and Vitalinea yogurts, in addition to the line of vegetable products Alpro.
In the last year, according to the data managed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, which maintains a monthly statistics on the consumption of milk and its derivatives In Spain, the market has registered a sharp contraction in purchases of dairy preparations, which in August 2023 (the last month for which data is available) was already 20% compared to the same month of the previous year. “The decrease in the dairy derivatives segment is explained by the decline in demand for some of the main categories such as milk shakes (10.4%) or yoghurt (2.4%), as well as cured cheese (7.5%), sheep’s cheese (11.5%) or custard (3.9%).
And among the yogurts, some varieties such as fruit (increasingly a minority) experienced real setbacks, with a 44% drop in the volume of kilos consumed in one year. The sales of yogurt with additives fell 17.5% and those of skimmed, 13.9%. Things went a little better for him, yes, flavored yogurt, which rose its figures by 10%.
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The situation of relegation, however, is not new. The dairy sector already accumulates various consumption reduction exercisesurged, among other reasons, by the wide variety of milk alternatives and plant-based desserts that have been launched on the market in recent times. Also due to prices: skimmed milk rose by 15.1% and yogurts by 8.6% between the summer of 2022 and 2023.
Thus, although Danone Spain assures that it is doing away with the Parets plant due to what it calls a “local process”, the workers do not miss that for two years the company has been in full review of your businesswithin a strategic plan that he called Renew Danone. In the balance sheet for the third quarter of 2023, presented by the company’s general director, Antoine de Saint-Affrique, last October, the results of the plan began to bear fruit. Sales in Europe, according to company numbersincreased by 5.1% compared to the third quarter of 2022, with a price increase of 9.2% and a decrease in product volume of 4.1%.