Last week brought news that's been a long time coming for anyone who buys or sells imported cheese: a five-year truce in an aircraft-subsidy trade dispute has suspended the 25 percent tariff line that's been sitting on a wide range of European goods, cheese included, since late 2019. The tariff was never really about cheese — it traced back to a dispute over aircraft manufacturing subsidies — but cheese, wine, and a handful of other specialty goods got swept in as retaliatory targets, and importers have been paying the price for a year and a half.
If you buy European wheels for your counter or your wholesale case, this is worth understanding in some detail, because "the tariff is gone" and "your landed cost changes today" are two different claims.
What actually changed
The suspension applies to the tariff line itself, not to any individual shipment already in transit or cleared under the old rate. If you have standing purchase orders with a European supplier, ask them directly whether their quoted price already reflects the tariff removal or whether it was built into a rate they haven't revised yet. Some suppliers absorbed part of the 25 percent themselves rather than pass the full cost to US buyers; others passed all of it through. That means the actual price relief you see at your dock could range from the full 25 percent down to something much smaller, depending on how your specific supplier priced the last year and a half.
The five-year window matters too. This isn't a permanent repeal — it's a truce, and truces can end. If you're planning a multi-year import relationship or negotiating longer-term contracts with a European producer, build in language that accounts for the tariff possibly returning before the truce's term is up. A supplier agreement that assumes today's landed cost holds for five years is optimistic.
Where this shows up on your shelf
For members who buy and resell imported cheese, the tariff removal is a chance to revisit pricing you may have set defensively back in 2019 and never fully unwound. A lot of shops quietly raised prices on affected imports at the time, ate the margin on some lines, or dropped certain cheeses from the case altogether rather than pass the full increase to customers. If your price sheet still reflects tariff-era costs that no longer apply, this is the moment to check it against your actual invoices rather than against what you remember charging in 2019.
For members who make cheese domestically and compete with imported European product, the calculus runs the other way. A cheaper European import is a more direct competitor on your own shelf than it was last month. That's not a reason to panic — domestic specialty cheese has real advantages in freshness and story that a container shipment doesn't — but it's a reason to look again at how you're positioning against imports at the counter, particularly in categories like washed rind and alpine styles where European product has historically set the price anchor.
The federation doesn't have a position on the aircraft dispute itself, obviously. What we can tell members is what the trade data shows: EU cheese imports into the US had been declining through the tariff period, with Japan overtaking the US as a bigger destination for EU cheese exports. A tariff truce is one input into whether that trend reverses, not a guarantee that it will.
If your business does meaningful volume in imported cheese, it's worth a conversation with your customs broker about how your specific supply chain is affected before you change a single price on your sheet. The border rules on any given shipment can turn on details — country of origin documentation, product classification — that a general news summary won't capture.
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.