Two members called our office this week with two opposite problems, and that's as good a summary of this market as anything we could write ourselves. One runs a grocery-facing plant and says the phones haven't stopped ringing since Thursday. The other sells almost entirely to restaurants, and hasn't taken an order since Monday.
We've heard versions of this split from members all week, and it's worth saying plainly: both are describing the same market from different windows.
What's moving at the counter
Shoppers are stocking pantries, and cheese is riding along with pasta and canned goods. Members who sell prepacked, exact-weight product through grocery channels are reporting volume well above a normal March — in some cases the busiest week they've had outside the December holiday run. If that's you, plan your milk intake for the next few weeks assuming this holds, not assuming it snaps back to normal.
The catch is what's selling. It's the reliable, recognizable wedge, not the small-batch washed rind your regulars love. Several retailers have paused cut-and-wrap service at the deli counter to keep staff and customers at a distance, which pushes demand even harder toward what already comes packaged. If your business runs through a service case, this is the week to have a prepackaging conversation with your retail accounts, not next month.
What's stalled everywhere else
Foodservice is the other side of the ledger, and it's ugly. Restaurants, hotels, and event caterers are cutting orders to zero as dining rooms close or empty out, and members whose case load is built around that channel are describing a shutoff, not a slowdown. There is no tasting-room or wholesale-account workaround for an account that has simply stopped ordering. If foodservice is a meaningful share of your sales, talk to your distributor this week about what retail-ready packaging would take, even as an interim step — Prairie Wind Refrigerated Transit and several of the regional cold-chain haulers our members use have told us they're already fielding these requests.
Milk futures softened again this week, giving back some of the winter's gains, and the spread between what a plant can get for its milk and what it costs to make cheese has gotten uncomfortably thin in places. That's consistent with what we're hearing: retail pull is real, but it isn't large enough on its own to absorb what foodservice has dropped. We'd rather members plan around a softer, choppier several weeks than assume this resolves itself in April.
A grocery-facing member reminded us this week that a busy phone doesn't mean a healthy month — she's running extra shifts to keep up with orders, but her margin per wheel is tighter than it was in January because the wholesale accounts that used to balance her mix have gone quiet. Busy and profitable are two different questions right now, and it's worth asking both of them about your own plant before you commit to extra hours or extra milk.
If you haven't already, this is a good week to update your own cash-flow picture rather than lean on last month's numbers — they're already out of date. Separate your sales by channel if you don't already, even roughly, so you can see which half of your business is carrying the other. And if foodservice is the half that's gone quiet, don't wait for it to come back before you start the retail-packaging conversation with your distributor — by the time the phone stops ringing at the grocery accounts, you want to already be in line for shelf space, not starting the introduction.
We'll keep watching the futures board and the phones both, and we'll say so here if either one changes the story materially.
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.