U.S. cheese exports closed out 2025 at a record volume, and trade desks are calling it one of the strongest years the category has ever had. That's genuinely good news, and it deserves to be said plainly before the caveat comes. The caveat is this: the reason buyers overseas kept ordering all year is the same reason domestic milk checks have felt thin since spring. U.S. cheese has been priced at a meaningful discount to the rest of the world's supply for most of 2025, and that discount is what moved the wheels, not a sudden surge in appetite for American cheese specifically.
Global dairy auction prices logged their seventh straight downward move this fall, the weakest reading in more than a year, as milk production kept climbing on larger herds and better output per cow while demand stayed merely steady. Put those two facts together and you get exactly what members have been living through: a market with plenty of cheese in it, buyers who can afford to wait, and a price that only clears when it's cheap enough to move.
Why "record" and "rough" are both true
If your operation sells any volume through an export-facing distributor, this year's numbers are worth knowing, because they explain a pattern a lot of members have described to us without quite naming it: strong movement, weak pricing. A cheesemaker selling wholesale into a program run through a distributor like Continental Specialty Provisions may have shipped more pounds this year than last, and still watched the average price per pound sit below where it was two years ago. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out.
For farmstead and small-batch producers who sell mostly at retail or through a local counter, the export story matters less directly, but it still shapes the shelf. When bulk commodity cheese is cheap and moving fast, it sets a low anchor price that specialty product has to explain its way past. A gift box or holiday case built around story, provenance and hand craft earns its premium, but only if the case copy and the counter conversation are doing that work. If a discount cheddar is sitting two feet away at half the price, "why does this one cost more" is a question your staff needs a ready answer for, not an afterthought.
A member who runs the wholesale side of a mid-sized creamery put it to us plainly on a call last week: "Our volume chart looks like our best year ever. Our margin chart looks like one of our worst. Nobody outside this business believes both of those can be true at once, but here we are." That gap between the two charts is exactly what we want members watching heading into 2026, not the top-line export number by itself.
What we'd watch into 2026
The federation's read, for what it's worth from where we sit: don't expect the discount to close quickly. Milk supply is still growing, and nothing in this year's numbers suggests demand is about to outrun it. That means margin discipline matters more than volume chasing for the year ahead — know your true cost per wheel, know which SKUs are actually profitable at today's pricing, and don't let a strong pounds-shipped number talk you out of asking whether the dollars behind it still work.
Our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of math: separating volume from value, and building a price floor that holds even when the broader market is discounting around you. If 2025's export headlines left you feeling like the story didn't match your bank statement, that course is a good place to reconcile the two before the new year's pricing gets set.
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.