Author: Emilia Milcheva
What is the exact amount that has been consumed of the product sold in Bulgaria as German butter, which, however, does not contain cow's milk? No institution in the country can answer this question. Tomorrow it may turn out that Bulgarian citizens have also eaten tons of sausages without meat, cheese without milk or honey that is not from bees.
Does the food quality control system work?
Fake butter is not just another label fraud. It also reveals the weaknesses of the official food control system. The scandal was not revealed in any of the more than 122,000 inspections that the Bulgarian Food Safety Agency (BFSA) reports for 2025. The fraud was stopped thanks to a signal from the importer of the original butter from Germany, who commissioned a laboratory analysis and notified the agency and the Commission for the Protection of Competition (CPC).
In response to questions from Deutsche Welle, the BFSA reported 1,574 audits of production plants and warehouses and 122,268 inspections in 2025, excluding daily controls in slaughterhouses. The agency knows how many inspections it has carried out and how many samples it has taken, but it cannot answer a seemingly elementary question: how many signals of inconsistency between the declared on the label and the actual composition of the food has it received in the last 4 years, in how many cases were laboratory samples taken and in how many was fraud confirmed? The reason given by the agency itself is as follows: that it does not maintain such statistics.
This means that the institution reports its activity - checks, samples and non-compliant samples, but not the actual result of the control. It is not known how many individual food frauds have been uncovered, how many operators have been sanctioned for misleading labeling, how many cases have been detected after signals and whether the violations are repeated.
How then can the consumer trust that the food on the label is the food in the package? When buying the product called Deutsche Markenbutter of 250 grams, people thought that they were buying German butter with guaranteed quality (this is what the term means) - 82% fat and without any vegetable fats. In reality, they were paying for palm oil, coconut and palm kernel fats, soybean and sunflower oil, as well as lard. Such food is contraindicated for people with cardiovascular diseases, and Bulgaria is first in the EU in terms of mortality from cardiovascular diseases for 2024.
Over six tons of the butter have been withdrawn from the store network and destroyed, but the exact amount eaten has not been established. The fake product was sold in grocery stores throughout the country and even in some retail chains, and it is entirely possible that it was also used by companies preparing various foods, including baked goods.
For the institutions, the case seems to be closed. The two companies have been fined nearly 310 thousand euros. And the prosecutor's office has not taken action itself for the fraud, the purpose of which is to obtain property gain.
Behind several laboratory samples may be a scheme with tens of thousands of packages that reached consumers and provided profit for its suppliers. Therefore, it is not without importance what the state control actually measures.
Under the National Program for Control of Food Quality Characteristics, 1,155 samples were taken, of which 153 - or about 13% - were found to have deviations, it is clear from the response to Deutsche Welle.
The highest share of violations in 2025 was found by the BFSA in foods with protected names - 25 out of 93 samples (27%), followed by dairy products, where in one of the groups of tests, deviations were found in 50 out of 247 samples (20%). In honey, violations were found in 16 out of 143 samples (11%).
Four out of only five olive oils tested also did not meet the requirements. These percentages do not indicate what proportion of all food on the market is problematic, because the samples were selected based on a risk assessment, not as a representative sample.
Where is the basket of clean food
The case of fake butter raises the following questions: to what extent can state control actually guarantee what is behind the label and is there another way to food of clear origin. While the BFSA reports the number of inspections and laboratory tests, Bulgarian farmers are looking for a way to shorten the chain between producer and consumer.
According to the chairman of the National Sheep and Goat Breeding Association (NOKA), Simeon Karakolev, this involves cooperation - producers should unite quantities, processing and sales, so that pure farm food does not remain an expensive commodity for a narrow circle of people. Karakolev, who has been fighting for a law on cooperation for over ten years, told Deutsche Welle that "in Bulgaria there are 30 times fewer associated farmers than the EU average".
Only this process will shorten the chain from producer to consumer, which is now too long and makes production more expensive, the livestock breeder says. Karakolev gives the example of the cooperative of over 400 farmers, created by NOKA, who joined forces to buy milk - "at 20% above the market price" in order to produce sheep cheese on demand. "Instead of our production going into this environment of high markups, such as the retail chains, we sold it on foreign markets at prices below 6 euros/kg", said Simeon Karakolev.
"In order to have short supply chains, the state needs to support the process – The Bulgarian Development Bank (BDB) has the tools to do so", says the livestock farmer, who hopes this will happen under the current administration.
The need for cooperation also comes from the dramatic change in Bulgarian livestock farming. According to the latest census of agricultural holdings in 2020, the number of those in which animals and poultry are raised has decreased by 74% compared to 2010 – then they were nearly 280 thousand. Today, animals are raised on 71,693 farms, but the average size of livestock farms has increased 3.5 times, because larger producers remain. With the exception of cattle and buffaloes, whose numbers are growing due to the EU's common agricultural policy, a decrease has been recorded for all other animals.
As small farms disappear and production is concentrated in fewer and larger farms, the consumer's options to buy food directly from the producer are becoming increasingly limited. This is precisely why, according to Karakolev, cooperation is no longer just a matter of economic efficiency, but also of access to food with a clear origin.
Food safety does not depend only on the four reference laboratories of the National Center for Food Safety. It also depends on whether the state will be able to retain enough small and medium-sized producers on the market who can profit from quality, not from its imitation.