About us

The company headquarters is located in the central part of Croatia on the slopes of Bilogora, 35 km southeast of the town Bjelovar. Zdenka is a company with a long tradition in the cheese production. It was founded in 1897, in Veliki Zdenci – an agricultural and stockbreeding area with expressed milk production. Rich pastures were ideal conditions for milk production.

The Dairy plant changed its name into Zdenka, after the ex owners’ daughter Zdenka. The photos of the sixteen years old Zdenka, framed by a horse-shoe and a four-leaf clover became a symbol of prosperity and double happiness as well as a trademark of the company.

In 1945, after the World War II the company was nationalized and became the state property, as all other private factories in the country. Only after 1950-ties, there were stronger growth and development; the company started to purchase milk, caused by the faster development of the country and tourism which resulted in an increased consumption of biological valuable food. An increased quantity of the manufactured and purchased milk led to the expansion of processing capacities and market sale of fairly large quantities of cheese. At first there were only some minor alterations, but in 1961 the reconstruction of the technological line for the processed cheese production started. An extremely intensive development began in 1970 when new buildings for a production of processed cheese and whey powder have been built.

The factory was state-owned until 2008. Nowadays, 112 years after its establishment, Zdenka is privately owned and a respectable, specialized dairy plant for production of dairy products. It is a market leader and a synonym of processed cheese, with more than 70 % share in the segment of processed cheese at the Croatian market. 

We successfully sell our products to the market of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro, and since 2016, our products can be found on store shelves in Bulgaria and Switzerland. In addition to exports to neighboring countries and EU countries, we are proud to export to America and Australia, too.

We have various certificates such as KOSHER, HALAL, HACCP, ISO 22000 and IFS Certificate, without which we would not even be able to realize the presence of goods on the domestic and foreign market.