Cottage Cheese Shortages Are Driven by TikTok and ‘Protein-Maxxing’

A couple of months ago, the cottage cheese at my local grocery store went missing. When I asked the cashier about the outage, she shrugged and said, “It sells out quick.”

Undeterred, I began checking other stores, and was met by the same fate. The cottage cheese stock, particularly the Good Culture brand, was often sparse or gone entirely.

Online, Good Culture fans were caught in the same bind. “It’s like the Hunger Games trying to get any,” one of them wrote on Reddit.

My curiosity was piqued: Where had all the cottage cheese gone?

The cottage cheese squeeze, I have learned, comes from a confluence of trends in health and food production leaving grocery shelves empty and stretching cottage cheese makers to their limits.

I have also learned how consumers, frustrated by a food system that they believe has profited from products linked to poor health outcomes, view deal-making in the industry with intense suspicion. In the case of Good Culture, some blamed the shortages on the brand’s recent sale to a private equity firm.

Until recently, cottage cheese had been dismissed as a soulless diet food. Sales of the product peaked in the 1970s, when the average American ate about five pounds of it per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But dairy manufacturers began to refocus their processing capacity on yogurt, which eclipsed cottage cheese sales by the mid-1980s.

A growing obsession with protein among American consumers has given the white curds a new life. A few years ago, online fans began posting about “protein-maxxing” with cottage cheese, adding it to ice cream, smoothies, flatbreads, bagels and pasta dishes. TikTok creators became cottage cheese converts, enticed by the product’s roughly 14 grams of protein per serving.

Sales grew to more than $2 billion in 2025, an 82 percent increase from the end of 2022, according to Circana, a market research firm based in Chicago.

The industry cannot keep up with the demand.

Kevin Ellis, the chief executive of Upstate Niagara Cooperative, a dairy company with headquarters in Buffalo, said manufacturers weren’t prepared for the resurgence.

“It was dying off,” Mr. Ellis said. “Then TikTok made it a thing,” and sales took off “like a brush fire.”

About three and a half years ago, the cooperative’s cottage cheese product began to sell out. The company has had to ration its supply for the nine brands it serves.

The cooperative is moving forward with its largest capital project in its 61-year history — a $275 million investment to expand production of its high-protein products, including cottage cheese, Greek yogurt and skyr, an Icelandic yogurt. The project will push the company’s cottage cheese production to 90 million pounds per year, up from 24 million.

In Wisconsin, the Westby Cooperative Creamery announced it was undergoing a $14 million renovation to increase its cottage cheese capacity to 24 million pounds per year from 13.2 million. The company has since sold out of cottage cheese for the next three years, including the additional capacity.

Part of the challenge of expanding supply is the complexity of making the product. At Westby, culturing cottage cheese takes 16 hours. The company’s new renovation will upgrade its culturing vats, cutting the amount of time to a still-lengthy eight hours.

At Good Culture, a cottage cheese newcomer based in Texas, sales revenue has roughly quadrupled in the past three years. The company reached north of $200 million in retail sales in 2024.

“We are servicing less than 50 percent of demand, because we can’t keep up,” said Jesse Merrill, a founder and the chief executive of Good Culture.

The idea to start the business came to Mr. Merrill in 2015. He had recently left a role in marketing at Honest Tea, and his wife, pregnant with their second child, was hooked on cottage cheese. It was nutrient dense, but Mr. Merrill said he “was horrified by the ingredient statement,” which was filled with additives that make foods last longer or look better.

He decided to remake the product with only whole food ingredients. “I saw just a major opportunity to modernize the brand, give it a face-lift, reimagine the category,” Mr. Merrill said.

In its first few years, Good Culture’s sales chugged along steadily until Kenzie Akers, a wellness influencer, posted a video to TikTok in which she made ice cream with the company’s cottage cheese. It went viral. People were “freaking out” about his product, Mr. Merrill said, and sales took off.

The upstart brand is now working with seven processing plants and is in the process of building two new plants of its own.

In January, the company was acquired by L Catterton, a private equity firm backed by the luxury giant LVMH. At the time, the cottage cheese brand was valued at more than $500 million.

Private equity money is deep into the food industry, investing in products including sandwiches (Jersey Mike’s) and coffee (Dunkin’). The L Catterton deal was the private equity firm’s first foray into buying a cottage cheese brand.

After the sale, online commentators suggested L Catterton may be responsible for disruptions to the product’s supply or even its quality.

Even my local grocery store owner was skeptical of the deal. “We haven’t had Good Culture in about 6 months,” she said in a text message when I asked about the outage. “They sold to a private equity firm, and it’s been really hard to get it.”

Consumers are particularly skeptical of larger owners of health-conscious brands, fearing they will introduce cost-cutting measures, like changing ingredients, which would lead to sacrificing quality and nutrition for profit.

“Only time will tell if it follows the trends of health-conscious food selling out,” Zephyr Zoidis, a journalist who tracks independent brands that have been bought out, said of the L Catterton deal in an Instagram post.

Steve Young, a managing partner at the investment firm Manna Tree, which invested in Good Culture alongside L Catterton, said those concerns were misguided.

“The second we make a decision in the short term to, you know, compromise our product standards is the second we start to drift into sameness, and that’s not something we will allow to happen,” he said.

In a statement, L Catterton said, “As we grow, our top priority is to continue producing the same high-quality product that our consumers know and love.”

For Good Culture, managing consumers’ anxiety about its new owners has meant playing defense on TikTok, where the company’s corporate account has left a trail of comments on videos claiming that something has changed about the product since its acquisition.

Last month, a fan of the company posted a video discussing rumors that “Good Culture got bought out, and they changed the formula” — a complaint she found hard to believe since the product was always out of stock. One day later, Good Culture’s TikTok account commented that “the recipe you love is still the same — same ingredients, same process.”

“I just want to find it in stock!” she wrote back.