The vast majority of raw milk (149.9m tonnes) was delivered to dairies, the rest being used directly on farms. It was used to produce a range of fresh and manufactured dairy products.
This information comes from data on milk and milk products just published by Eurostat. The article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article on milk and milk products.
Among other products, dairies produced 22.5m tonnes of drinking milk in 2022; 7.7m tonnes of acidified milk products from 6m tonnes of whole milk and 1.7m tonnes of skimmed milk; 2.3m tonnes of butter from 46.4m tonnes of whole milk: and 10.4m tonnes of cheese from 59.2m tonnes of whole milk and 16.9m tonnes of skimmed milk. Together, the production of cheese and butter used 70% of all the whole milk available to dairies in the EU.
Among EU countries, Germany was the biggest producer of drinking milk (19% of the EU total), butter (20%), acidified milk products like yoghurts (29%) and cheese (22%). France was the second largest producer of both butter and cheese (18% of the total in each product).
Germany, together with Spain (15% of the EU total), France (13%), Italy (11%) and Poland (9%) accounted for two thirds of the drinking milk produced in the EU in 2022.
Other EU countries were key producers of other fresh and manufactured dairy products: the Netherlands was the second largest producer of acidified milk products in the EU (15% of the total), the fourth largest of cheese (9%), and the fifth of butter (10%), while Ireland was the third largest producer of butter (13% of the EU total) and fifth largest of acidified milk products (7%).
