Two numbers crossed our desk this week and they point in slightly different directions. Cheese exports are having a strong year, on pace to set a new annual volume record once the final quarter is counted. At the same time, federal cow-count data shows the national dairy herd still growing, modestly but steadily, which usually means more milk chasing the same shelf space by spring.
For members who sell mostly domestic, the export story is good news at one remove. When cheese moves overseas, it tightens the market here too, which has helped hold cheese prices up through a fall that otherwise had the feel of oversupply. If you make a style with export appeal — hard grating cheeses and long-aged wheels travel best — this is a reasonable window to ask your distributor whether an export-adjacent account is worth chasing next year.
Trade press has also been tracking a butterfat shortage in the EU that is tightening some imported styles' supply chains, which is part of why domestic cheese has looked more attractive to buyers who might otherwise import. That is a real opening for members making European-style wheels domestically, but it is a supply hiccup abroad, not a durable shift, and it is worth treating it that way in your planning rather than banking on it lasting through next year.
Reading the herd number against your own plan
A slowly growing herd is not alarming on its own, but it is worth weighing against how you price a spring release. More milk in the system tends to soften milk price before it softens cheese price, so a farmstead producer buying milk on contract may feel relief before a producer selling finished wheels does. If you lock in ingredient costs seasonally, this is the month to have that conversation with your supplier rather than waiting until March, when everyone else is having it too.
Members on our Membership & Outreach Committee have flagged that a few smaller producers are asking whether now is the time to add wholesale capacity, given the strong export headline. Our answer, consistently, is: look at your own margin before you look at the national number. A federation-wide trend is a tailwind, not a plan. If you want a second set of eyes on where your own numbers sit against this year's market, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps office hours specifically for that kind of gut check — reach out through the member directory to get on the list.
What we are watching into December
The next data point that matters for most of you is how holiday demand actually lands against this year's higher export baseline, and whether cheese pricing on the wholesale side holds through the usual January dip. We will have a clearer read in our December wrap-up, once full-year export figures start to firm up. Until then, treat "record export year" as context for your planning conversations, not as a number to build a budget on by itself. If a distributor or a buyer asks you to commit to volume based on this year's export headline alone, it is fair to ask them to show their own numbers first.
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.