Ceará Formalises Artisan Cheese Production Through Certification
Ceará is Brazil’s third-largest milk-producing state in the Northeast and ranks among the country’s ten largest producers. More than 100,000 producers are distributed across all of the state’s municipalities, with total output of about 2m litres. A large share of artisan cheese dairies, however, remains limited to local sales because it lacks formal sanitary inspection.
State Law 17,318, introduced in 2020, established a regulatory framework for artisan cheese made in Ceará. The measure enabled hundreds of dairies to begin formalising their operations. State inspection certification, known as SIE, and national certification, or SIB, allow products made in Ceará to be sold across the Northeast and in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Federal inspection certification, or SIF, is required before the state can export.
The state has two of Brazil’s 15 recognised dairy basins. In the Eastern Ceará basin, Morada Nova produces almost 300,000 litres per day. The Central Ceará basin is led by Quixeramobim, where daily output exceeds 200,000 litres. Samuel José de Magalhães Oliveira, a researcher at Embrapa Gado de Leite, said productivity per cow nearly doubled between 2014 and 2024, rising from 857 to 1,654 litres a year.
Processing capacity remains smaller than the national average. Brazilian dairy plants collect an average of 38,000 litres a day, compared with 18,000 litres in Ceará. “That is a challenging factor for the competitiveness of the dairy chain,” Mr Oliveira said. José Antunes, president of Ceará’s dairy-industry trade union and owner of Laticínios Vale do Pirangi, which buys milk from 60 producers, said cows yielding 8 to 10 litres a day had once been considered productive. Today, he said, even a cow producing 25 litres daily “does not pay for itself”.
Mr Antunes identified pressure from both domestic and external markets. Some of the Northeast’s dairy herd is being converted to beef production, reducing the supply of milk. Producers also face competition from imported milk from Argentina and Uruguay. He said a possible European Union-Mercosur agreement could bring European cheeses onto Brazilian shelves, while an inadequately designed tax reform could affect state incentives that support the use of locally produced milk.
The dairy sector has a gross production value of R$2.32bn, more than one-fifth of Ceará’s total agricultural gross production value, according to Ana Clara Cavalcante, head of Embrapa Caprinos e Ovinos. It supports between 73,000 and 85,000 families, more than 80% of them family farmers. Milk sales generate income throughout the year, and the state’s PAA Leite programme buys local production for schools, nurseries and hospitals.
Tax reductions on ICMS and the Selo Arte certification have supported the formalisation of artisan dairies in areas including the Lower and Middle Jaguaribe, which has about 2,000 such businesses. Queijaria Dona Vita, based in Limoeiro do Norte, became the first dairy outside the state capital to receive authorisation to sell nationwide. Framilk, founded in 1994 in a farmhouse producing only queijo coalho, now buys milk from partner producers and makes mozzarella, processed cheese, ricotta, butter and dulce de leche for distribution across dozens of Ceará municipalities. Its owners, Vicente Francélio Maia and Carmen Lúcia Barreto, said they wanted to expand and innovate while preserving the quality and character developed over more than three decades.
