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others. Under this system, he would place orders at the beginning of summer and pay in installments, with part at the end of summer and a final payment at the end of the year, although the actual work would extend into the autumn.
He realised that there was a need to make multiple cheeses and that he needed a model cheese plant to show to investors and prospective cheesemakers. So, by 2018, he had built an analogue, just outside of Ulaanbaatar. Given the close proximity to the city, the price of milk near the model plant is too high
to do actual cheese production, but it can serve as a training school for new cheesemakers.
Michael’s next step was to send his wife to France to study cheesemaking. Once she returned, she began teaching the required skills at the model cheese plant. The plant is an exercise in simplicity. It occupies only one hectare of land, with the building itself, measuring 10 metres by 10 metres. There are two gers (yurts) for workers to live in, out back. The plant has its own transformer for electricity and gets its water from a well. The building is designed so that the workers are in the centre, while deliveries and shipping occur at various doors, around the outside. This saves space and means that the workers and the cheese move around very little. Michael’s vision
is for this model to be replicated in communities across the country. There are six projects already in progress, with one scheduled for 2021, in Dornogovi Province in the Gob Dessert.
The plant currently makes 20 kinds of cheese. Each kilo of cheese requires ten kilos of milk. The curds can be dried
and sold and the whey can be made into candy or drinks which have a higher value than milk. Moving forward,
the hope is to add whey processing
to the cheese plant. Due to the Covid lockdowns, with schools and hotels closed, herders lost their milk income, so the government has offered to buy each kilo of milk for 5,000 Mongolian tugrik ($1.75) over the market price. This would increase the price of a single kilo of cheese by 50,000 tugrik, a price the market cannot bear. Consequently, there is a shortage of cheese and the only cheeses available are the hard cheeses which were made and stored last year.
Export market
The Ulaanbaatar cheese market, explained Michael, is price sensitive, unsophisticated, and small. And so, export markets had to be found. It is, however, not easy to export cheese
from Mongolia. Food is subject to strict regulations in both the export country and the import country. And each import country has its own, unique regulations. Being approved for one country does
not guarantee being approved for another. Not only is cheese food, it is also classified as an animal product and a dairy product, making the restrictions even more stringent.
Clearing the export hurdles would be
a boon for Mongolia’s cheese industry. Michael estimates that 100 cheese plants could produce 2,000 tonnes per year. “China alone consumes 200,000 tonnes, Korea 200, Japan 300 and Russia 500,000 tonnes. Not all of that
is high end cheese. At the high end of those markets is say 50,000 tonnes. As a conservative number, it is not impossible to sell 2,000 tonnes of Mongolian cheese
into such a large market when we can compete on quality and price.”
Artisanal cheese from the steppes
“This is the only place in the world where you can make cheese from animals grazing on wild grass. The great Mongolian commons is the only [such] place in the world left,” said Michael. “We are an exotic supplier. And, we not only have cows we have goats and sheep and horses and yaks and camels.”
Currently, yak cheese is being used
to make yak cheddar in Ovorhangai Province. They have had goat cheese in the past and plan to make more in the future. Of all of the milk-giving animals in Mongolia, the horse is the only one whose milk cannot be used to make cheese, because the lactose level is too high. It can be used, however, to make the Mongolian traditional drink of fermented horse milk, called Airag (kumis).
Michael’s vision is for Mongolia to become a niche producer of exotic, high- end cheese which differentiates itself
in quality and uniqueness. Mongolian hoofbeats will, once again, find their way to Japan, Russia, Korea, and the world.
The author, Dr. Antonio Graceffo PhD China-MBA, worked as an economics researcher and university professor in China, but is now living in Ulaanbaatar, writing about the Mongolian and Chinese economies. He holds a PhD from Shanghai University of Sport Wushu Department where he wrote his dissertation “A Cross Cultural Comparison of Chinese and Western Wrestling” in Chinese. He is
the author of 11 books, including A
Deeper Look at the Chinese Economy,
The Wrestler’s Dissertation, and Warrior Odyssey. He completed post-doctoral studies in economics at Shanghai University, specializing in US-China Trade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and Trump-China economics. His China economic reports are featured regularly in The Foreign Policy Journal and published in Chinese at The Shanghai Institute of American Studies,
a Chinese government think tank.
All photographs except where stated courtesy of the author.
One of the two gers (yurts) that the cheese plant workers live in.
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