For most of March and the first half of April, members told us the same thing in different words: the bottom fell out and nobody could see where it stopped. Restaurants, school cafeterias, and stadium concessions had accounted for a meaningful share of the country's cheese movement, and when that channel closed almost overnight, the wholesale board didn't have an orderly way to absorb it. Some regions saw farms with nowhere to send milk at all, and a few had to dispose of it on the farm rather than let a tank overflow.
This week, several members in the pricing and sales side of our membership are telling us something different: the board looks like it's found a floor, at least for now. That's not the same as saying it's recovered. It means the free fall has slowed enough that a buyer and a seller can agree on a number without both of them assuming it'll be wrong by Friday.
Why retail cushioned what food service couldn't
The piece of this that surprised a lot of people outside the industry, and honestly a few inside it, is that retail cheese sales did not collapse. They did close to the opposite. Grocery buying jumped hard in the back half of March as households stocked pantries and freezers, and that demand has stayed elevated into April even as the initial panic-buying wave passed. It hasn't come close to replacing what food service used to move, especially for the wedge and specialty formats that depend on a chef building a plate around them. But it has kept block and barrel cheddar from falling as far as the raw oversupply numbers alone would suggest.
For members running a retail case or supplying one, that split matters. If your product line leans toward the ten-pound block going into a sandwich shop, this stretch has been brutal and the recovery will likely track food service reopening, whenever and however that happens region by region. If your line leans toward something a home cook picks up for a Tuesday dinner, you may be busier than you've ever been, even while the trade press writes about a crisis.
What we're watching next
A few things will tell us more than this week's price alone:
- Whether cold storage inventories, which came in lower than a lot of analysts expected in the most recent report, keep tightening or were a one-time blip from the retail surge.
- Whether any part of food service reopens in a way that actually moves cheese volume, as opposed to reopening with capacity limits that keep orders small.
- Whether the milk-dumping reports we heard through early and mid-April taper off as processors adjust, or whether they're a preview of a longer supply-side adjustment.
If you're trying to price a spring or summer contract right now, our honest advice is to build in more flexibility than you normally would and to talk to more than one buyer before you commit. This is not a market that rewards confidence about where things sit six weeks out. If you want a second opinion on a specific contract question, the Standards Committee has been fielding more of these calls than usual and can point you toward members who've been through comparable stretches 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.