Early September usually marks the point where our members start thinking about fall menus, holiday orders, and whatever the last quarter of the year is going to demand of a cave that's already full. This year it also marks a strange split we've been hearing about all summer: the retail cheese case is doing fine, and the wholesale side of a lot of businesses still isn't.
Industry reporting for the year through the first week of September shows natural cheese dollar sales up again, with a noticeable jump in the crumbled and pre-cut categories — the kind of format that does well when people are cooking more of their own meals. If your business ships to grocery, or you run a retail counter yourself, that tracks with what several of you have told us this quarter: steady traffic, decent margins, customers willing to try a new wheel if you can tell them something about it.
The gap is in the dining room
The harder conversation is on the foodservice side. Restaurants, hotels, and the specialty accounts that used to build a cheese course or a board program around a producer relationship have been slower to come back than retail has, and members who built their business on that channel before 2020 are still working out what a smaller version of it looks like. A few of you have told us plainly that the wholesale accounts that reopened aren't ordering at the volumes they used to, and the ones that are ordering are asking for smaller, more frequent deliveries instead of one large weekly drop.
That's not a reason to give up on wholesale — it's a reason to look at it differently than you did two years ago. A smaller, steadier order from a restaurant that's rebuilding its own staffing and its own customer base is still real revenue, and it's often coming with more flexibility on delivery windows than a pre-2020 account would have offered. If your creamery has capacity you built for a busier wholesale calendar, this is a good year to ask whether a direct-to-consumer channel — a subscription box, a farmers' market table, an online order form — can pick up some of that slack instead of leaving it idle.
We heard something similar from members who sell primarily to specialty retail: the smaller, independent shops came back faster than the big-box accounts did, and they're more willing to carry a limited-run or seasonal wheel that a larger buyer wouldn't take a chance on. If you haven't reintroduced yourself to the independent shops in your region since last year, this is a reasonable month to do it — several members mentioned that a phone call, not an email, is what actually got a meeting on the calendar.
What we're watching this fall
We're keeping an eye on two things for members heading into Q4. First, milk supply growth has been running behind last year's pace through late summer, which tends to firm up prices a little as the year closes out — worth factoring into your fall pricing conversations rather than assuming input costs hold flat. Second, several of you have mentioned that this year's virtual conference season — ours included — has actually been easier to attend than the in-person circuit used to be, simply because it doesn't cost you a day of production and a hotel bill. That's not a small thing for a two-person creamery, and it's part of why we've kept our own fall programming online again this cycle.
If you're trying to figure out where your own business sits in this split — retail steady, wholesale still finding its footing — the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting notes from exactly this kind of conversation all summer. Reach out if you want to compare what you're seeing against what other members in your region have told us.
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.