On Turning Dutch, Amanda van Mulligen writes about life as an expat mother, expat wife and an expat writer.

Holiday plans outside of the Netherlands this summer? How will you cope without Dutch cheese during your vacation? Luckily, you don’t have to because there’s vakantiekaas available just for you!

Dutch are cheese mad
One of the stereotypical icons for the Netherlands is undoubtedly, alongside clogs and windmills, cheese. And where there’s smoke there’s probably fire.

The Dutch produce a lot of cheese. 650 million kilos per year, if you want figures. The Netherlands is the fourth largest cheese producer in the world. Bearing in mind the size of the country, this is an impressive fact.

1.5 million dairy cows go about their daily business in the Netherlands, enabling cheese to end up on millions of plates a day.

So cheese and the Dutch really are an inseparable combination.

Vacation plans? shock, horror – what about the cheese?
Vacation plans outside of the Netherlands really gets in the way of the usual Dutch cheese consumption.

How on earth do you survive when you holiday abroad and there is no Dutch cheese to be found in the supermarkets?

It’s an issue that the Dutch supermarkets have jumped upon. And solved.

You can stock up and buy your vakantiekaas in the Dutch supermarket before you leave for your holiday. And simply take it with you. Click here to see what I mean.

In our local Jumbo there is a little stand for displaying vakantiekaas. In case, you forget that your foreign holiday will be completely and utterly ruined by the absence of jong belegen.

Genius. Pure marketing genius.

And don’t be thinking this is just regular Dutch cheese with a vakantiekaas label on it…you can’t just willy-nilly randomly take other cheese out of the Dutch supermarkets with you on holiday. This is special packaging so you can take it with you.

My vacation cheese plans
I’m going to be honest with you all. I won’t be transporting great chunks of Dutch cheese when I go on holiday. I am actually looking forward to sampling lots of cheddar and Shropshire cheeses this summer!

Cheese with lots of flavour and texture.

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