Six weeks ago members were asking us what to do with a walk-in that wouldn't stop filling. This week the question flipped. A member on our Membership & Outreach Committee called Thursday asking whether she should even be quoting new restaurant accounts a price, because the number she'd have given on Monday was already wrong by Wednesday.
Block cheese has more than doubled off its spring low. That's not a typo, and it's not speculation dressed up as fact — the federal dairy market service's weekly report for this exact week describes cheddar supplies as tight and cheesemakers running full production schedules to keep up, a sharp reversal from the glut those same reports were describing in April. Restaurants reopening even partially, at reduced capacity, still need to restock a cooler that sat mostly empty since March. Retail never stopped buying, and a wave of farm-stand and online direct sales has added a third source of demand on top of the two that were already there. For a few weeks in between, foodservice buyers, retail buyers, and a member's own direct customers were all bidding on the same vat of curd.
What moved and why
The plain version: milk production didn't collapse in the spring the way demand did, so processors had more raw milk than orders. Then demand came back faster than anyone repriced for. A market that goes from "please take this cheese" to "there isn't enough of this cheese" in a month and a half doesn't behave gently on the way through — you get whiplash pricing, and whiplash pricing punishes whoever locked in a contract at the wrong moment.
If you sell direct, this is probably good news dressed as a headache: your case is worth more than it was in April, assuming you can still get product to move at all with dining rooms still capped. If you buy from a distributor on a formula tied to the block price, watch your next invoice closely — not because anyone's doing anything wrong, but because a formula that felt generous in April can feel punishing in June, and it helps to know which direction you're on before the bill arrives, not after.
What we'd tell a member calling this week
Don't sign anything past 30 days right now if you can avoid it. Nobody — not us, not your distributor rep, not the loudest voice on a dairy forum — has a confident read on where this settles for July. If you've got aged inventory you were holding for a slower market, this may be the week to move it. And if a restaurant account is asking for the pricing you quoted them in April, it's fair to explain that April doesn't exist anymore.
We'll keep watching the weekly reports and passing along what we see. If your own numbers don't match the general trend — up sharply where the market's down, or the reverse — tell us. That's usually the more interesting story, and it's often the first sign of something specific to your region worth flagging to the rest of the membership.
We're also hearing from more members who've picked up new direct-to-consumer volume this spring — a farm stand, a standing online order list, a weekend market that used to be a nice-to-have and is now a real percentage of revenue. That channel doesn't move with the same speed or the same rules as a wholesale account, and it's worth pricing separately rather than pegging it to whatever the block market is doing that week. A regular at your farm stand isn't shopping the futures board; she's used to paying what you charge, and a sudden swing either direction tends to read as a signal about your business, not about the dairy market. If you've built a direct pricing approach that's holding up, the Membership & Outreach Committee would like to hear about it — that's the kind of practical detail we'd rather pass along member to member than guess at ourselves.
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.