Two numbers crossed our desk this week that don't sit comfortably next to each other. The commodity cheese price climbed again, extending a run that's been building since October, on stronger demand than anyone was projecting a few months ago. A dairy-commodity update published earlier this month described the same pattern globally: second-wave outbreaks pushing governments toward mixed restrictions even as retail cheese demand stayed firm. At the same time, several states moved to tighten indoor dining rules again as case counts climbed through November, which means the demand behind that price isn't coming from restaurants.
It's coming from retail. Grocery cheese cases have stayed busy all fall as households continue to cook more at home than they did a year ago, and that steady pull is what's been lifting the federal milk price components tied to cheese. If your business sells primarily through grocery, deli, or direct channels, this rally has probably reached you already. If a meaningful share of your volume runs through restaurants, hotels, or catering, you're likely watching the same headline number from the outside.
Two markets, one price
We've written before about a cheese case that can't agree with itself, and this week is a return to that theme with sharper edges. A restaurant account that was finally rebuilding its order in September or October may be pulling back again as dining rooms close or drop to a fraction of capacity. Meanwhile, a farmstead producer selling through a co-op or a regional grocery chain is seeing steadier, even growing, demand for the same product.
If you sell into both channels, this is a good week to look at your order book by account type rather than by total volume. A blended number can hide a foodservice account that's about to go quiet and a retail account that's about to ask for more than you can make. Members who've been tracking this split since spring tell us it's made conversations with distributors easier — you can tell them plainly which orders are likely to hold and which ones might not.
What we're watching into December
The federal forecast for next year's all-milk price moved up slightly this month on the strength of this cheese and whey demand, which is a reasonable signal that the current rally isn't a one-week blip. But foodservice conditions can change faster than a forecast, and several members in states with new restrictions have told us they're bracing for another slow stretch at the restaurant end of their business even as retail orders hold up.
If your holiday production planning assumed a foodservice recovery that isn't going to happen this year, it's worth revisiting now rather than in December. A few members have already shifted wheels earmarked for restaurant accounts into retail-ready formats — smaller cuts, better shelf labeling — while there's still time to sell them that way. If you're weighing that kind of move, our Membership & Outreach Committee has fielded a lot of these conversations this fall and is a reasonable first call.
None of this is a call to abandon foodservice relationships that have been part of your business for years. Accounts that go quiet under a lockdown order tend to come back once restrictions lift, and members who've kept in light touch through past closures — a short note, a small sample sent along with a retail delivery — say it's made the restart faster each time. The point isn't to write off the channel. It's to plan production for the volume you can actually count on through the next several weeks, and treat anything beyond that as upside if the restaurant side recovers sooner than expected.
We'll keep tracking both sides of this split through the holidays. If your own order book is telling a different story than what we've described here, we'd like to hear about it — member accounts like this are usually the first signal that a broader shift is coming before it shows up in the federal price reports.
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.