The Class I base price moved up again this month, and members on our pricing list have already noticed. It's a welcome number after a summer that felt slower than most, but it's also not the whole story, and we want to walk through what's actually moving before you set your holiday order sheet.
Federal market reporting through mid-October shows Class I climbing roughly fifty cents per hundredweight from September, driven mostly by a strong butter market. Cheese and nonfat dry milk, by contrast, pulled back after a sharp run-up earlier in the fall tied to a widely watched milk production report. That's an unusual split — butter pushing higher while cheese eases — and it means the number on your milk bill and the number on your wholesale cheese invoice aren't necessarily telling you the same thing this month.
Two markets, one order sheet
If you buy cheese wholesale for a counter or retail case, the softer cheese market is a small piece of good news heading into the holiday rush — your cost per pound isn't chasing the same fire that butter is. If you make cheese yourself, the calculus is different: your milk input cost is still climbing even as your finished product's market price cools, which is exactly the kind of margin squeeze our Education Committee hears about most in the fourth quarter.
Milk supply growth has also slowed. Year-over-year production growth came in below where it sat a year ago, and forecasters are pointing to tighter cow numbers as part of the reason. Tighter supply with holiday demand on the way tends to firm prices further before it loosens them, so if you've been putting off locking in a fall or winter contract, this is the week to make that call rather than wait for a clearer signal that may not come before the holidays are underway.
None of this is a prediction we're willing to put a number on for December — markets like this one have surprised forecasters twice already this year. What we can tell you is that a $0.49 move in Class I in a single month is large enough that if your pricing sheet hasn't been touched since late summer, it's overdue.
What to do with it this week
A few practical steps for members watching this:
- If you're a cheesemaker, run your current milk cost against your last posted wholesale price and check whether your margin has actually moved, rather than assuming it tracked with the headline number.
- If you're buying wholesale for a case or counter, ask your supplier whether their quote reflects the cheese market's recent pullback or is still priced off the earlier spike — the two are a real difference this month.
- If you sell direct, remember that your price sheet can move independent of the federal order system. A firmer input market doesn't obligate you to hold last month's shelf price, and it doesn't obligate you to raise it either.
Members working through a first holiday pricing pass can find worked examples in Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese, which walks through exactly this kind of split-market month. If your numbers don't add up the way you expect, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to a member willing to talk through how they're handling the same question this quarter.
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.