Truckers' Strike Freezes Italy's Buffalo Mozzarella Output, €3 Million Lost in a Day

Italy's buffalo mozzarella production has stopped dead, and the bill for a single day is 3 million euros ($3.4 million). A weeklong truckers' strike over diesel costs has cut off the tightly timed supply chain behind Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, the Naples region's protected cheese, an industry official said.

What exactly has halted?

Milk is the problem. Buffaloes have to be milked whether or not dairies are running, and production rules require that their milk become mozzarella within 60 hours. Farmers typically have only enough storage to hold fresh milk until dairy trucks collect it — they can't stockpile it for long.

The result: about 1 million liters of buffalo milk produced on Wednesday couldn't be turned into mozzarella because of the transport blockade, according to Pier Maria Saccani, director of the Consortium for the Protection of Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, the body that oversees production standards and guards the cheese's designation of origin in Italy and abroad.

"Yesterday, no mozzarella was produced," Saccani said, calling it a "3 million-euro block in 24 hours."

Several dairies have stayed closed. Saccani described the situation as a "complete production blockade" — dairies can't afford to pile up a highly perishable product when trucks can't deliver it to customers.

Why are farmers panicking?

Because the milk keeps coming. "So this blockade has obviously caused panic among farmers, who say, 'Where are we going to put it?'" Saccani said.

Some farmers have resorted to feeding part of the unused milk to their own animals, since they have nowhere to send it, Saccani said. The transport disruption also threatens supplies of animal feed and diesel that farms need to keep operating.

"It's a very, very complex and delicate situation," he said.

What is the government doing?

The strike, driven by the high cost of diesel pushed up by the Iran war, has also blocked deliveries of basic goods to supermarkets and left gas pumps empty across much of southern Italy.

At an extraordinary Cabinet meeting on Thursday, the government led by Premier Giorgia Meloni approved new tax breaks for truckers and farmers facing higher fuel costs. The measures lift combined financial aid to the two groups to 540 million euros in tax credits, up from 434 million euros. As of Thursday, it was too early to tell whether the package would be enough to end the protest.

How strained was the industry already?

Badly. Saccani said the consortium estimates production costs have risen about 30%, driven by increases in animal feed, diesel, energy, plastic packaging and transportation. Those increases haven't been fully passed on to customers, he said, so producers are absorbing much of the expense and profitability is suffering across the supply chain.

Unlike the false claims this summer that Parmigiano Reggiano production was in crisis due to extreme heat, buffalo mozzarella output is genuinely in jeopardy.

How big is this business?

Buffalo mozzarella is a cornerstone industry in Campania — the region that includes Naples — and neighboring parts of southern Italy. Saccani said 2025 production of Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP totaled just under 58,000 metric tons, with about 37% exported. France is the largest foreign market.

That scale is why a week of idle trucks bites so hard: every 24 hours without collections wastes roughly a million liters of milk that can never become cheese. If the strike drags past the government's new tax credits, the 3-million-euro-a-day damage compounds — and France's cheese counters feel it too.