Two calls came into the federation office last week, both about the same week's numbers, and they didn't agree with each other. One member said their retail case had never moved faster — customers stocking up, buying blocks instead of wedges, buying two of everything. The other said their milk supplier had asked them to take an extra load they hadn't ordered, because the supplier had nowhere else to send it. Both members are telling the truth. That's where the industry sits this week.
Two markets pulling apart
The plumbing that usually carries milk from farm to plate has two main pipes: one runs to restaurants, cafeterias, and foodservice, and one runs to grocery. Over the last several weeks the foodservice pipe has effectively closed as dining rooms shut down, while the grocery pipe has widened as households cook more at home. A fluid product like fluid milk can't easily be rerouted from one pipe to the other on short notice — a tanker built for a food-service account doesn't have a grocery buyer waiting on the other end of the phone.
For members who make aged and specialty cheese, this shows up as a strange kind of whiplash. Retail sell-through is up. Wholesale and food-service accounts — the restaurant cheese board, the hotel breakfast buffet, the airport kiosk — have gone quiet or canceled outright. If your book of business leans food-service, you are watching a surge in category demand that isn't reaching you. If you lean retail or direct-to-consumer, you may be busier than you've ever been and short-staffed for it.
Some of the excess milk that can't find a home is being diverted into storable forms — bulk block cheese, butter, milk powder — which is one reason members are hearing about ample or even long supply on commodity cheese even as specialty producers report tight capacity. Two true things, one supply chain.
A few practical notes from calls this week, not as economic forecasting but as what's actually landing on desks. Producers with an online ordering page report it filling a real gap for customers who no longer have a farmers' market or in-person tasting room to visit — if yours isn't built yet, even a simple order form beats none. Members who supply restaurant accounts are asking those accounts for firm cancellation or hold dates rather than open-ended silence, so cheese doesn't age past its intended window waiting on an order that isn't coming. And cold storage and cave space is getting asked about more than usual: if a wholesale order falls through after a wheel is already committed to aging, where it sits for the next several weeks matters.
We don't have a clean read yet on how long this split between retail and food-service lasts, and we're not going to guess at a number we can't support. What we can say is that it's showing up in nearly every call we've taken this week, from the smallest farmstead producer to members who supply national accounts.
What to do with this
If your business model depends heavily on one channel — food-service in particular — this is a good week to look hard at what direct-to-consumer options exist for you, even temporary ones. The Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding questions along these lines and can point you toward members who've stood up an order-and-pickup system quickly. If you're seeing unusual volume from your milk supplier, or unusual silence from a wholesale buyer, we want to hear about it — patterns we see across many members are more useful to everyone than any one data point.
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.