Understanding the Local Tofu Economy in Switzerland

Switzerland grows less than 1 % of the soya it uses. Agroscope puts national demand at roughly 300,000 tonnes of soya meal a year, and almost all of that goes into animal feed. Food-grade soya, the kind that becomes tofu, occupies a far smaller footprint: Mühle Rytz and the Progana cooperative, who spent twenty years building this supply chain, report more than 500 hectares of organic food-grade soya in the country. Set against 300,000 tonnes of imported meal, that is a rounding error. It is also where most of the organic tofu sold in Switzerland comes from.

That gap explains nearly everything else worth knowing: why Swiss tofu costs what it costs, why the word “Swiss” on a pack means less than shoppers assume, and why a farmer who plants soya for tofu takes a risk that a farmer planting feed soya does not.

What the country actually produces

The Agroscope figure deserves a moment. Those 300,000 tonnes of annual meal represent livestock demand: dairy cows, pigs, poultry. Swiss production covers under 1 % of it. The rest arrives by ship and lorry, mostly as meal, and never touches the chilled aisle.

Food-grade soya runs on a separate track. Different varieties, different intake specifications, different buyers. The 500-plus hectares reported by Mühle Rytz are the product of two decades of work with Progana, using tofu varieties largely bred by Agroscope at Changins, Swiss seed, and Swiss cultivation. The same source notes that this soya costs more than twice as much as imported organic soya, because there is no tariff protection at the border.

That is a blunt economic fact, and it tells you more than any amount of sustainability language. Swiss organic tofu exists because a processor and a cooperative agreed to pay double for the raw material, and because retailers agreed to sell the result.

Why soya is a hard crop here

The scarcity of Swiss food-grade soya is not a failure of political will. It is agronomy, and FiBL’s technical guide to organic soya cultivation (Swiss edition, 2025) itemises it.

Sowing happens around mid-May, once soil temperature passes 10 °C at 5 cm depth. Harvest falls between mid-September and mid-October, after 120 to 150 days depending on site and maturity group. Sunny sites up to roughly 650 metres of altitude suit the crop, with soil pH between 6 and 7. That rules out a good share of the country.

Soya is a legume, but the bacteria that let it fix atmospheric nitrogen, Bradyrhizobium japonicum, do not occur naturally in European soils. Without seed inoculation the plant reaches only 50 % of its yield potential. With it, those bacteria supply 80 to 100 % of the crop’s nitrogen needs. Inoculant costs around 40 francs per hectare, which is nothing, but you cannot fix a mistake afterwards: FiBL states plainly that inoculation after sowing is not possible.

Weeding is where the money goes in organic production. FiBL gives 10 to 25 hours of hand weeding per hectare when mechanical weeding has worked and the season is not excessively wet. When several unfavourable conditions stack up, that figure climbs to 150 to 200 hours per hectare. And where weed pressure is heavy and the weather blocks any response, the entire harvest can be lost.

Average organic yield under good management sits between 20 and 25 dt per hectare. In optimal conditions, with irrigation and weed control, over 45 dt is achievable. But food-grade varieties yield 10 to 20 % less than feed varieties, because breeding targets flavour, protein content and processing behaviour rather than tonnage.

The sum the farmer does

Reference prices for organic arable crops published by Bioaktuell allow a direct comparison. Organic food-grade soya traded at 210 to 235 francs per quintal in 2025 at market prices. Organic feed soya is fixed at 141 francs per quintal for 2026, plus an 18-franc support contribution, giving 168 francs.

The gross gap looks comfortable: 42 to 67 francs per quintal in favour of food-grade. But it has to be corrected for the lower yield of tofu varieties. At 22 dt per hectare and 220 francs per quintal, food-grade soya returns roughly 4,840 francs of gross revenue per hectare. Feed soya at the same yield and 168 francs returns about 3,696 francs. The real difference is around a thousand francs a hectare, before counting the extra weeding hours and the downgrading risk.

Because food-grade soya is accepted under conditions. FiBL lists a standard moisture content of 11 %, a price deduction from 1 % impurities, a deduction from 2 % broken grains, and rejection for musty odour or fungal attack. A batch that misses those criteria does not become tofu; it goes to animal feed, at animal feed prices. That downgrading risk, more than the headline price, is what limits the number of farmers willing to try.

What “Swiss” legally means on a pack

This is where consumer intuition goes wrong most reliably, and the rules are public.

Swissness legislation took effect on 1 January 2017. According to the Federal Office for Agriculture, a food may carry the Swiss origin indication only if at least 80 % of the weight of its raw materials comes from Switzerland (100 % for milk), and if the processing step that gives the product its essential characteristics takes place in Switzerland.

The catch is in the calculation method. Article 48b of the Trade Mark Protection Act provides that raw materials enter the calculation according to their Swiss self-sufficiency rate. Materials at 50 % or above count in full. Those between 20 and 49.9 % count for half. Those below 20 % may be excluded from the calculation altogether.

Annex 1 of the ordinance on the use of Swiss indications of source sets the self-sufficiency rate for soya at 12.7 %. Below the 20 % threshold. Which means the soya in a product can lawfully be left out of the 80 % sum, making a Swissness claim possible on a soya product whose soya is not mostly Swiss. This is not a loophole someone found; it is the mechanism the law built for raw materials the country does not grow in sufficient quantity.

No prior authorisation is needed to use the indication. Enforcement happens afterwards, by cantonal chemists under the ban on deception, with civil action available under articles 55 and 56 of the Trade Mark Protection Act and criminal complaint under article 64.

The indication that is mandatory

The Swiss Federal Food Safety Office information letter 2024/2, dated 24 July 2024, sets out the applicable framework. The country of production is compulsory for all foods, unless it is already identifiable from the specific product name or the address on the pack (art. 15 para. 6 of the food information ordinance).

Two details change how you read a tofu label.

First, the origin of an ingredient means the origin of the raw material, not of the processing. The office uses flour as its example: you must state the country the wheat came from, not the country where it was milled. Applied to tofu, the relevant origin is where the soya grew, not where it was curdled and pressed. Tofu made in Switzerland from Austrian beans is, as far as the raw material goes, Austrian-soya tofu.

Second, if an ingredient comes from several countries, all of them must be named. A pick-list such as “Switzerland, Austria or Italy” is not permitted. And unlike the country of production, ingredient origin cannot be broadened to a vague geographical area, except where the statement is voluntary.

Finally, a Swissness declaration triggers an additional duty: ingredient origin must be declared once non-animal ingredients exceed 50 % by mass and do not come from Switzerland. On a block of tofu, where soya is by far the dominant ingredient after water, that rule has teeth.

In practice this gives you a simple shop-floor method: look for the country of the soya, not the place of manufacture, and treat a Swiss cross with no bean origin statement with suspicion. Our guide to reading a food label covers the general logic, and the one on Swiss labels separates what each logo guarantees from what it merely implies.

From bean to block

The process has not changed in centuries: soaking, grinding with water, cooking, filtering to separate soya milk from okara, coagulation, pressing, cooling.

The step that matters to the shopper is coagulation, because the coagulant determines the final composition. With calcium sulphate, tofu becomes a meaningful calcium source. With nigari, essentially magnesium chloride, calcium stays low and magnesium rises. The ANSES Ciqual composition table gives 100 mg of calcium per 100 g of plain pre-packed tofu alongside 100 mg of magnesium, and only 21 mg of calcium for silken tofu. This is not a manufacturer’s technicality: the coagulant line in the ingredient list tells you whether your tofu contributes to your calcium intake or not. Our article on calcium without dairy puts those numbers against a daily requirement.

On the variety side, Agroscope has been breeding non-GMO soya for over forty years, explicitly targeting processing suitability, high protein content, cold tolerance during flowering and low heat-sum requirements. For tofu, beans with a yellow hilum are preferred because they yield a pale tofu without unwanted colouring, though FiBL notes that hilum colour does not affect tofu quality itself. Breeding a line takes 12 to 15 years before it is multiplied and released to growers. That timescale explains why a food-grade soya chain cannot simply be announced: it takes two decades to build, which is precisely the timeline Mühle Rytz describes.

What is in a portion

Swiss dietary recommendations place tofu in the protein-rich food group, of which adults should eat one portion a day while varying the sources across the week. One portion is 120 g of plain tofu, tempeh or seitan. For comparison, a portion is also 60 g of dry pulses, or 100 to 120 g of meat or fish.

For 120 g of plain tofu, working from the Ciqual per-100 g values, you get roughly 178 kcal, 16.1 g of protein, 10.2 g of fat including 1.62 g saturated, 3.4 g of carbohydrate, 120 mg of calcium, 2.9 mg of iron, 120 mg of magnesium and 0.03 g of salt.

The same portion of smoked tofu gives about 197 kcal, 17.9 g of protein and 0.89 g of salt. The ratio is stark: smoked carries roughly thirty times the salt of plain. Smoked tofu is still a good product, but it belongs in the salty-foods category and should be counted as such across a day, not treated as interchangeable with the plain block.

Silken tofu plays a different game: 54.3 kcal and 4.57 g of protein per 100 g. It is a texture ingredient, useful in desserts and sauces, not a protein source comparable to firm tofu.

For the bean itself, Ciqual gives 432 kcal, 34.5 g of protein, 19.2 g of fat, 13 g of fibre, 220 mg of calcium and 15.7 mg of iron per 100 g. FiBL puts bean protein between 35 and 45 % depending on variety and oil between 15 and 20 %, with around 20 % fibre and 2 to 3 % lecithin, the highest of any vegetable oil.

Comparing bean and block also shows where the nutrients go. Of the 34.5 g of protein per 100 g of dry bean, 13.4 g per 100 g survive into plain tofu, because tofu is 73.8 % water. Fibre takes a different route: Ciqual gives under 0.5 g per 100 g of plain tofu against 13 g in the bean. Most of the fibre stays behind in the okara at the filtering stage, and that pressing residue is perfectly usable in patties, spreads or biscuits. Counting tofu as a fibre source is a miscalculation; counting it as a protein source is correct. For the fibre side of a day, local legumes are the obvious complement.

The iron in tofu is plant iron and follows the same absorption rules as iron from lentils or chickpeas. The 2.9 mg in a 120 g portion is not a directly usable figure: how much you absorb depends on what else is on the plate. Our article on optimising plant iron absorption covers that mechanism.

What the research says about health

Tofu carries two opposite reputations, and neither survives contact with the numbers.

On cholesterol, the best available synthesis is the meta-analysis published in the Journal of Nutrition in 2019, which reworked the 46 trials the US FDA had assembled while considering whether to revoke the heart health claim for soya protein. Across 43 usable trials, at a median dose of 25 g of soya protein a day over a median six weeks, LDL fell by 4.76 mg/dl (95 % CI −6.71 to −2.80) and total cholesterol by 6.41 mg/dl (95 % CI −9.30 to −3.52). That is a reduction of roughly 3 to 4 %. Real, statistically solid, and modest. About three quarters of trials point the same way, but only a minority reach significance individually, and there is no dose-response effect.

On isoflavones, EFSA concluded in 2015 that the evidence reviewed does not suggest harmful effects on the mammary gland, uterus or thyroid in menopausal and post-menopausal women. A 2026 review in Nutrients describes a murkier picture for breast cancer risk: prospective cohorts associate higher isoflavone intake with reduced risk, but randomised trials on risk markers do not support that protective association. The hypothesis that early exposure during childhood or adolescence is what matters is over thirty years old and supported by animal and retrospective work, but the absence of randomised trials rules out any recommendation.

What holds up: tofu is a good protein source, it shows no identified hazard at ordinary intakes, and it cures nothing. If you want the long version of that argument, we have covered it in the myth of dangerous soy and in soy misconceptions.

Food soya and feed soya do not compete for the same hectares

One confusion recurs endlessly in public debate: tofu gets blamed for soya-driven deforestation. The Agroscope figures settle it in a line. Swiss demand is estimated at 300,000 tonnes of meal a year, meaning animal feed, and over 80 % of world soya production is GMO while the food-grade soya sold in Switzerland is overwhelmingly organic, hence non-GMO by definition.

Tofu and meal come from different varieties, different chains and different specifications. Blaming a block of Swiss organic tofu for South American feed-soya hectares confuses two products that share only a species name. This does not make soya innocent in general; it moves the question to where it actually applies, which is livestock feeding.

That said, soya has real merits in a rotation. FiBL notes that it needs no nitrogen fertiliser, that it is self-compatible and does not contribute to legume soil fatigue, and that its vigorous root system and quickly decomposed residues generally leave good soil structure. It still recommends a three to four year break between soya crops to prevent sclerotinia and diaporthe, and at least four years’ spacing from oilseed rape, sunflower and beans, which host the same sclerotinium. It also points out that soya leaves little or no nitrogen for the following crop, unlike faba beans or peas. Our article on lesser-known local legumes places soya among the other protein crops possible in Switzerland.

Six common mistakes

Assuming tofu made in Switzerland is made from Swiss soya. Place of manufacture and bean origin are two separate facts, and only the second tells you about the farming chain.

Reading the Swiss cross as a guarantee of raw material origin. At a 12.7 % self-sufficiency rate, soya can be excluded from the 80 % Swissness calculation.

Treating smoked tofu like plain tofu. 0.89 g of salt against 0.03 g for a 120 g portion, a factor of about thirty.

Expecting silken tofu to replace firm tofu in a protein dish. 4.57 g of protein per 100 g against 13.4 g.

Assuming all tofu supplies calcium. It depends on the coagulant, and the ingredient list says which one.

Blaming tofu for soya deforestation. The soya causing that problem ends up in feed troughs, not in blocks of organic tofu.

What this article cannot settle

Ciqual is a French composition table, applied here to products sold in Switzerland; a specific block may deviate, particularly on calcium, which depends on the manufacturer’s choice of coagulant.

Bioaktuell reference prices are farm-gate prices for organic soya and say nothing about processor margins or retail prices. No consolidated public statistic exists for the market share of Swiss tofu against imported tofu, so this article advances none.

The figure of more than 500 hectares comes from a chain participant, Mühle Rytz, which is also a commercial party. It is consistent with the sector’s order of magnitude, but it is not a federal statistic.

Finally, the cholesterol results concern isolated soya protein at controlled doses, not blocks of tofu eaten across an ordinary week.

Frequently asked questions

Is Swiss tofu always organic? No, but the structured Swiss food-grade soya chain run by Progana and Mühle Rytz is an organic one, and most organic tofu sold in Switzerland comes from it.

Why does Swiss tofu cost more? Because the raw material costs more than twice as much as imported organic soya, with no tariff protection, and because tofu varieties yield 10 to 20 % less than feed varieties.

How much tofu comes from a kilo of beans? The usual order of magnitude is 2 to 2.5 kilos of tofu per kilo of dry beans, which is consistent with the protein content of both products: 34.5 g per 100 g of beans against 13.4 g per 100 g of tofu.

Does tofu cover my protein needs? A 120 g portion supplies about 16.1 g of protein, which Swiss recommendations treat as one daily portion of protein-rich food among several to vary across the week. See the complete guide to plant proteins.

Should I avoid soya with a thyroid or hormonal condition? EFSA identified no harmful effect on the thyroid, uterus or mammary gland in menopausal and post-menopausal women. A personal medical question belongs with your doctor, not an article.

How do I find out where my tofu’s soya came from? Ingredient origin means the country where the raw material grew. If several countries are involved, all must be named, and a pick-list is not permitted.

Does shop tofu contain additives? Plain tofu should contain soya, water and a coagulant. Flavoured or breaded preparations are a different category, which we cover in additives in commercial meat substitutes.

Can I make tofu at home with Swiss soya? Yes, provided you can find food-grade soya beans, which remain rare at retail because the chain works mainly on contract with processors.

Sources