Members who sell into grocery have had a strange summer: busy in a way that would normally call for hiring, in the middle of a year that called for almost everything else to shrink. Retail tracking data for the 52 weeks ending in early September shows natural cheese dollar sales up close to 16 percent, with unit sales up nearly 9 percent — growth that started in March and never really let go. Processed cheese, usually the slower half of the case, was up too, by double digits in both dollars and units.
The explanation members keep giving us is simpler than a market report. People are cooking at home more, they're tired of the same four dinners, and a wedge of something aged feels like an actual event when there isn't much else on the calendar to look forward to. A member who sells wholesale in the upper Midwest put it to us this way after last month's virtual conference session: a customer used to compete for attention with the restaurant down the street, and now competes with whatever dinner used to be before all of this.
A gap that isn't closing
The problem is that this growth is almost entirely a retail-case story. Members who built their business around tasting rooms, restaurant accounts, or farmers-market sampling are not seeing the same lift, and several told us this summer that a strong grocery number is cold comfort when it's attached to someone else's shelf, not theirs. Foodservice volume for cheese has stayed depressed since spring, and members without a direct line into a grocery buyer have had a hard time redirecting product that was cut, wrapped, and priced for a different customer entirely.
We've heard of members repackaging restaurant-format wheels into smaller retail cuts, re-labeling for a grocery cooler instead of a chef's walk-in, and, in a few cases, approaching a regional distributor for the first time in the business's history. None of that is free, and none of it is fast — new labels mean new nutrition-panel work, and a new distributor relationship means renegotiating terms from scratch in a bad year to be asking. If you're in the middle of that shift, our Events Committee has been collecting short case studies from members who've made it work; reach out if you'd be willing to share yours, or if you want to see what others have tried before you reinvent your own label.
What to watch this fall
The open question members are asking us is whether this is a permanent shift in how people buy cheese, or a pandemic-year spike that reverses the moment restaurants and events come back in force. We don't know yet, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing harder than the data supports. What we'd suggest instead: hold onto whatever retail relationships and packaging formats you've built this year, even after foodservice starts to recover, if it does. A second channel is worth more to a small creamery now than it was back in January, and it may be worth more still if this fall brings another wave of dining-room closures.
If your business straddles both channels and you want a sounding board on pricing or packaging for grocery, the Membership & Outreach Committee can connect you with a member who's already been through the transition and is willing to talk through what worked.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.