I noticed something that seems kind of crazy to me: 0.5 L of kefir at Migros or Coop costs 2.50 CHF, while you can get 0.5 L of beer at Coop or Denner for just a little over 1 CHF.
How does that make sense economically? Kefir is basically fermented milk, while beer requires brewing, fermentation, alcohol taxes, and so on.
I drink two bottles of kefir a day, so that’s 5 CHF every single day just for kefir. It honestly hurts a little inside every time I think about spending 5 CHF a day on fermented milk.
At that price, it starts to feel like healthy food is simply being sold at a huge premium — almost like a rip-off for people who are trying to eat and drink healthier.
Is kefir really that much more expensive to produce, or is it mostly because it’s a niche product with lower sales volumes and higher margins?
I’m genuinely curious if anyone here knows how pricing works in Switzerland.
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Posted by Code-12345
18 Comments
Water cheaper than milk. People drink more beer.
Economy of scale? I woudl bet there’s a *lot* more beer being brewed than Kefir. I’d also think Kefir is a lot more finicky – you want preciser temperature management and if something goes wrong, as it’s milk, its possibly much more dangerous.
secondly, there’s lots of big breweries, meaning big competition, at least on basic beers.
Better beers cost a lot more than 1 frank per half liter. Yeah you can get shitty lager for that price, but a good IPA will be more like three or five franks.
Also, milk isn’t cheap. Milk costs about 75 cents per liter (probably more under the strict bio naturaplan label). A quick google tells me the wheat and such for Beer costs about 16 cents per liter of beer.
Lastly, you can make Kefir at home quite easily. Get some Kefir crystals and get going!
2 bottle of kefir a day?
I can barely have 1 in a month
Why do you think 2 bottles a day is healthy? How many calories is that? About 500-600, what else do you put in your kefir?
kefir requires cows, cows are expensive
Because Kefir is a hype drink. Beer is not.
Because beer is definitely cheaper than milk
Ragebait. Stupid post
I like Beer
Why do you think kefir should _not_ cost more than beer?
(Also, the beer than you get for 1CHF will probably not be _that_ good. Consider drinking water instead.)
Because swiss’ve just discovered kefir… for them it’s “new”, “healthy” and “trendy” thing
Do your own kefir at home if you drink that much, why wife does that
Guy who makes beer, cheese, etc. here.
Beer is fermented grain juice. Grain is very cheap.
It is shelf stable, lasts for a long time, can be mass produced at ambient temperature.
Anything involving milk is a pain in the ass. It varies significantly by source, not just in components but also in bacteria that comes with it. It spoils, requires extreme sanitizing, needs to ferment at very exact temperatures, etc.
It also requires a cold supply chain which is very expensive.
But what really surprises me is that none of this is obvious to you. It should be.
I would say before 70k Ukrainians started to leave here, the only available kefir was in yoghurt plastic cups or very expensive from one Moldavian lady https://www.ludmilalaube.ch/en/products/kefir-nature 9,5 chf !!! You could buy it only in globus or chäsebaub in Bern. So it’s expensive but at least more affordable than before
How do you drink these ones? They are tasteless.The only more or less tasty one was from Alnatura, but the really good kefir is in the east European shops. Swiss do not know how kefir should taste.
Beer: you put plants in a brewer. Beer. Kefir: you pur plant in a cow. Cow has to grow another cow (because otherwise there is no milk). Cow then produces milk. Milk has to be fermented.
Then there is economy of scale. Kefir has no history in Switzerland. Therefore small batches.
Kefir is stupid expensive in Switzerland compared to the prices at Lidl in Germany. The half liter there is between EUR 0.79 (store brand) and EUR 1.29 (Müller) if I remember correctly. Buttermilk is also less expensive and more tasty there. The price difference for regular milk is much smaller.
The best would be to get raw milk from a farm store (CHF 1.40 per liter at Stettbach), and ferment it yourself.
I wish it was at least in one liter cartons.
Just make your own. I did that for a long while. Go to tutti, there’s lots of people ‘selling’ some kefir grains for basically free (3-5 CHF plus 1chf shipping, that’s more or less just paying for the amount of effort it takes to ship). Get a 1l or something jar from Landi or something, get cheap 2l milk (Uht works just fine), put it in there, wait a day, strain it, boom, good kefir.
You don’t need to listen to all those esoteric people about only using plastic strainers and so on. Metal works just fine