Are We In The Midst Of A Cottage Cheese Shortage?
Did you have trouble finding cottage cheese the last time you visited the grocery store? Protein-maxxing may be to blame.
The diet trend, which encourages people to maximize their daily protein intake, is making a difference in terms of the types of products you can now find on grocery shelves—including protein-enhanced chips, lattes, pizzas and even candies—but also the types of products you can’t find.
Reports of cottage cheese shortages appear to be most prominent in Montreal, where one shopper recently told CTV they had to go to three stores before they could snag a container.
Why cottage cheese?
What’s so special about cottage cheese? The fresh cheese product is a solid source of protein—rivalling Greek yogurt in terms of content—with nearly 25 grams of the muscle-builder in one cup.
That’s likely the reason why cottage cheese has gone viral in the past two years as a cheap and easy way to increase protein intake. Recipes that include the dairy product—from ice cream to pasta to pancakes—have flooded social feeds. As a result, demand for cottage cheese has reportedly increased by as much as 30 percent across the country.
At my local store, there’s cottage cheese in stock, but my online shopping service marks the item as a “bestseller” which suggests demand is high. When Team Chatelaine recently visited a north Toronto Costco, a sales clerk only laughed after being asked if Kirkland brand cottage cheese was in stock. (It was not.) In the past two years, shortages have also been noted in Vancouver, Calgary, Prince Edward Island, Ottawa and Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.
While a labour dispute at a cottage cheese producer in Quebec in late 2025 was likely partly to blame for a cottage cheese shortage in eastern Canada during that time, experts agree that ongoing shortages are a result of the product's newfound celebrity.
A 2026 trend report from Nourish Food Marketing, a Toronto-based marketing agency that serves the food, beverage and agriculture industries, underlines how social media has created a cottage cheese revival. According to the report, 84% of Gen Z actively try social media food trends and 70% say TikTok is their “primary platform” for food recommendations.
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Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont. She’s written for The Narwhal, the Globe and Mail and The Guardian.
