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....