The July Class III milk price announcement landed at roughly $16.49 per hundredweight, down about 72 cents from June and a startling $8 or so below where it sat in July of last year. If your first reaction to that second number was "wait, prices dropped that much," you're reading the chart correctly. Last summer's figure was inflated by emergency government cheese purchases that pulled a lot of product off the market at once. This year's number, by contrast, looks more like an ordinary summer: milk output running a little ahead of last year, cheese inventories adequate, and buyers not competing for scarce supply the way they were in 2020.
We're mentioning this not because any single month's Class III print should change how you run your creamery, but because we've had enough members ask "is the market cooling off, or did we just lose last year's floor" that it's worth separating the two questions. The floor is gone — the food-box program that propped up cheese prices through the worst of last year has ended, as it was always going to. Whether the market is actually cooling depends on what you sell and to whom, and that's a much murkier answer.
What this does and doesn't tell you
If you sell fluid-milk-equivalent product into a Federal Order pool, the Class III number is directly relevant to your check. If you're a farmstead cheesemaker selling wedges at a market stand or wholesale accounts you built yourself, it's much more of a weather report than a forecast — it tells you what direction the wind of the wider commodity market is blowing, not what your own case will do this month. We've heard from members in both camps this week, and the split in how much this number matters to them is close to a straight line between "I sell into a co-op pool" and "I sell direct."
What does seem consistent across both groups is that this summer feels closer to a normal cheese-market summer than any point since early 2020 — prices moving on ordinary supply-and-demand mechanics rather than emergency purchasing or a collapse in foodservice demand. That's not nothing. A market that behaves the way markets are supposed to behave is easier to plan a price sheet against, even when the number itself moves against you.
What to do with a number like this
If you haven't looked at your own cost structure since spring, this is a reasonable prompt to do it — feed, packaging, and shipping costs have all moved during the same window, and a milk price coming back down doesn't mean your own margin is doing the same thing. Members using Dairy Margin Coverage should keep an eye on how the program's near-term numbers are shaping up; several of you have asked us about supplemental coverage details still working through discussion in Washington, and we don't have anything definitive to report yet, but we'll flag it here the moment there is.
For everyone else, the practical takeaway is smaller: this is a good week to re-check your wholesale price sheet against where the broader market has actually landed, rather than where it was a year ago when everything was distorted. If you want a second set of eyes on that math, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a standing list of members willing to compare notes on pricing — reach out if you'd like an introduction.
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.