Why I believe short shelf life gets the best from our cottage cheese

Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a lady in the store. She is a new customer, who just moved to Singapore from Europe. She noticed that the shelf life of our cottage cheese is several weeks, which is what she knew from Europe.

But, she had seen cottage cheeses elsewhere with expiration dates of several months, even half a year. So she asked me, “how is that possible?”.

A good question that luckily I knew the answer to. I’d had a talk with one of our suppliers just a month back on that topic. It turned out there are two important points:

1. Producers can increase the shelf life massively by adding stabilizers and artificial preservatives. A fresh cottage cheese, with a few weeks shelf life, will have very few ingredients other than milk. Those products which have to stay alive for several months will have a much longer list of ingredients. So, it really depends how natural you want to have it.

2. Some producers or retailers extend the shelf life by freezing cottage cheese. Freezing food is not necessarily bad, but it impacts the product quality after freezing and thawing. You can see a change in texture - becoming less smooth or creamy, more grainy, and also more watery - that might make it look like it is falling apart. I have also noted that the taste becomes different.

While from a pure logistics point of view my life would be much easier if I brought in cottage cheese with super long shelf life, for me freshness comes first.

We have always opted for the shorter shelf life of fresh cottage cheese, because we believe in stocking the most natural version possible. We also don’t freeze the cottage cheese.

It can be challenging to get high quality products to Singapore from Europe, but that is our mission - to make sure we get you the best possible versions of those products to your table!

If you have any thoughts or experience with cottage cheese, I’d love to know. Just email me at anna@annasgourmet.sg. I’m always happy to hear your views!

All the best,

Anna