An upstart dairy in Norway that for years has battled against the country’s dominant dairy market regulator, Tine, isn’t giving up its effort to bust what it calls Tine’s remaining “monopoly” on one of the country’s most successful export products, Jarlsberg cheese. A local court upheld Tine’s claim that it has exclusive rights to the Jarlsberg brand, but its small rival Synnøve Finden is filing an appeal.
In a humourous press release Friday afternoon, in which it literally blacked out all references to the word “jarlsberg” (which it spells without a capital letter), Synnøve Finden reversed initial reports that it might have to destroy all of its new “Kongsgård-” brand cheese because its packaging described it as “a type of jarlsberg cheese.” Its new cheese is meant to compete head-on against Tine’s Jarlsberg cheese, but Synnøve Finden feared it wouldn’t be able to because of the court’s backing for what it also calls Tine’s “rewriting of history.”
Synnøve Finden, one of the first small dairies to start competing against Tine when Norway’s dairy cooperative giant was forced to give up its monopoly in the mid-1990s, claims that Norway’s “jarlsberg-type” of cheese dates back to as early as 1815. “Tine’s story that it created the cheese in 1956 is therefore not correct,” claims Martin Tollefsen, director of cheese at Synnøve Finden. “The myth that Tine founded the cheese is spun by Tine itself, and repeated in its marketing.”
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