Paper short abstract:

The paper discuss the production of raw-milk cheese in Sardinia in view of the concepts of tradition, change and retro-innovation. The last model regards product innovation, and/or cheese making techniques, marketing and communication strategies.

Paper long abstract:

In Sardinia, which hosts three millions of sheep and almost 100 cheese factories, many of them are small dairies, raw-milk cheese is traditional. In the last 20 years some local cheese-makers have begun to reform the production through pasteurization or using thermised milk, others continue tradition, like for Fiore Sardo production, done with raw milk. Finally, some others applied "retro-innovation" concept to improve traditional typologies of cheese by means of innovative techniques and/or new marketing and communication ideas. Their efforts also lead to the production of cheeses, which are quite uncommon for the Sardinian foodscape, like blue cheese, white-rind cheese, ovine mozzarella cheese and some others, mostly derived from raw-milk. The paper describes the different forces and dynamics at work in these processes, through selected some case studies.