Next Sunday, a new set of duties on US-made cheese heading to China is scheduled to take effect, layered on top of tariffs already in place from the last two years of back-and-forth. For most of our members that's a paperwork problem for a customs broker somewhere, not a kitchen-table one. But we have enough export-facing members — cave operators shipping through regional consolidators, a handful of co-ops selling direct — that it's worth a plain explanation before the invoices start looking different.
Here's the shape of it. The additional duty applies on top of what's already assessed, and it covers the same broad dairy categories that have been targeted since the first rounds two summers ago: fresh, aged, and processed cheese along with milk, cream, and curd. If you've been exporting into that market since 2018, you've already absorbed one or two of these adjustments. This is another one, not a first one — which is cold comfort if your margin was already thin, but it does mean most of you have a playbook.
What's actually changing for members
If your product moves through a distributor rather than direct, ask them plainly which tariff schedule line your SKUs fall under and whether the new rate applies before or after any existing duty. We've heard from members working with import-export intermediaries — the kind of firm that handles cold-chain logistics into Pacific ports — that classification questions are where most of the confusion lands, not the rate itself. A cheese entered under the wrong HS code can end up paying a rate that doesn't match what's actually in the box.
The other piece worth knowing: this isn't the whole trade picture right now. Earlier this summer, a separate retaliatory tariff that Mexico had placed on US cheese came off, and export volumes into that market have been recovering since. So the net picture for members who sell into both markets is genuinely mixed — worse into China, better into Mexico — and it's worth running your own numbers rather than assuming the headline direction applies to your business.
Reading your own export mix
We asked a few members who ship regularly what they're actually doing about it, and the answer was less dramatic than you might expect. Nobody we talked to is walking away from a market over a single-digit rate change. What they are doing is re-checking their landed cost on each lane — freight, the existing duty, and now this addition — and comparing that against what a domestic wholesale buyer would pay for the same volume. For a couple of members, that math still favors export even with the new line added. For at least one smaller producer we heard from, it tipped the scale enough that they're shifting a fall shipment toward a domestic account instead and holding off on the export order until the picture settles.
That's the kind of decision that only makes sense looked at lane by lane, not as a blanket policy. A wheel that clears customs easily and sells at a strong wholesale price abroad might still be worth shipping even with the new duty; a thinner-margin format might not be. If you haven't run that comparison recently, next week is a reasonable prompt to do it, before your next shipment is already on a truck.
We're not going to tell you whether to change your export mix; that's a call for you and your own numbers, not something the federation should be making for you. What we can do is keep tracking the schedule changes as they land and flag them here, and point members toward the government trade data that actually shows category-by-category movement rather than relying on a general "tariffs are bad" read that may not match your specific product line.
If you ship internationally and want a second set of eyes on how a schedule change might hit your specific tariff line, reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee — several members there have been through two rounds of this already and are glad to compare notes.
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.