“He left and came back with all my favorite foods: Manchego cheese and chocolate truffles and a cold bottle of Sancerre wine.” This menu is the one enjoyed at a crucial moment in history by the protagonist of ‘Lost’, a bestseller by the American Gillian Flynn that Hollywood made a movie of in 2014 with Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike and Neil Patrick Harris.
It is not uncommon for a bit of Manchego cheese to appear in an American bestseller, because the country of Uncle Sam is the main market for this emblematic product of the region. This idyll has even endured the mess of Trump-era tariffs.
Right now, one in four cheeses that the region sells abroad is eaten by an American. This summer the territorial delegation of the Institute of Foreign Trade, ICEX, published a sectoral report on this product. With the data for 2022, the last closed year, Castilla-La Mancha billed 204.2 million euros abroad for its cheese sales and of that amount, 59.6 million come from the North American market, 29 percent.
The same does not happen at the national level, where the main markets are France and Portugal, two neighboring countries. In third place, sales to the United States appear, with a total of 90 million. Of that amount, two thirds are due to the success of cheese from Castilla-La Mancha on the other side of the Atlantic.
In 2022, the turnover of cheese exports from the region exceeded the barrier of 200 million. The figures have not stopped rising during the last five years, although in 2022 they shot up 27%. In this 2023, 59.8 million had already been reached in the first four-month period.
And also in Portugal, France and Germany
Portugal is the second most important market for Castilla-La Mancha cheese, at least according to 2022 data, with 28.4 million in turnover. It is followed by Germany, with 21.5 million, and then a very ‘cheese’ country: France, with 18.9 million. Sales to the United Kingdom, despite Brexit, also exceed 10 million. And vice versa? Castilla-La Mancha imports cheese, mainly from France, for 88 million, followed by Belgium, with 27.7 and Germany, with 20.7.
2023-08-27 05:14:52
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