The forecast this week was not subtle, and by today it's arrived: a fast-moving cold front is crossing a large stretch of the country, bringing the kind of temperature swing and wind that turns routine trucking into something else entirely. For most industries that's a scheduling headache. For ours, it lands on the single heaviest shipping week of the year, when a decent share of the specialty cheese sold all season moves in about ten days.
We're not a logistics company and we won't pretend to forecast which lanes hold and which don't. But a few members who distribute wholesale have already told us they're building in extra transit days and rerouting around the parts of the country seeing the worst of it, and if you ship anything perishable this week, that's worth doing too — better a wheel that arrives a day late than one held on a truck through a blackout.
A market that's already been unusual all year
The storm is landing on top of a dairy market that spent 2022 doing things it hasn't done in years. Milk prices set records for most of the year, driven largely by butter prices that kept climbing well past what most of us expected in January. Farmer margins improved meaningfully as a result, which matters for the growing share of our membership that produces milk as well as cheese. But in the last several weeks, butter, milk powder, and whey prices have all started to soften, even as cheese itself has held up better than the other categories — a sign that demand for finished cheese is proving stickier than demand for the ingredients that go into it, at least so far.
That divergence is worth watching into the new year. Several of the trade reports we read this month flagged the same set of headwinds for 2023: rising interest rates, general inflation pressure on grocery budgets, and softening demand out of some of the largest importing markets. None of that is a prediction we're in a position to make ourselves, and a lot can change between now and spring. But if your business plan for next year assumes 2022's price environment continues indefinitely, this is a reasonable week to stress-test that assumption against a steadier, more ordinary 2023.
What we'd actually do this week
If you're shipping wholesale orders before Christmas, call your carrier or distributor today rather than tomorrow, and ask directly whether your route is affected. If you're a retailer waiting on inbound holiday stock, ask your supplier for a realistic delivery window rather than the one on the original invoice. And if a shipment does get delayed and you're worried about temperature abuse in transit, that's a food-safety question, not just a logistics one — our Food Safety Committee has fielded exactly this question before and can point you to the right documentation to request from your carrier.
None of this is glamorous advice, but most good logistics advice isn't. The wheels that make it through a storm week intact are usually the ones whose shippers made a few boring phone calls three days early instead of one panicked one the night before.
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.