If you've been watching the milk check and wondering why it keeps drifting the wrong direction while your wholesale orders stay steady, this month's numbers explain the split. The federal government's latest supply and demand estimate held the milk-fat side of the export forecast flat, but raised the skim-solids side on the strength of higher expected cheese and dry whey shipments abroad. Domestically, June's Class III estimate slipped to the mid-16s per hundredweight and the all-milk price came in a bit below May's number. Two different stories, same month.
For most of you the practical read is this: the softening you're seeing on the milk-price line is a supply story, not a demand story. Production keeps edging up as herds recover from last year's culling and feed costs stay manageable, and that extra milk has to go somewhere. Right now it's going into more cheese leaving the country, not into more cheese sitting in a warehouse. That's a meaningfully better problem to have than the one most of you were living through eighteen months ago.
What it means at the vat
If a meaningful share of your business runs through a distributor with an export book, ask them directly whether your product line is part of the mix. A few of our members supplying Pacific Rim Cheese Imports and similar distribution partners have told us their order volumes actually firmed up in the past few weeks even as the domestic wholesale case softened — which tracks with what the federal numbers are showing at the aggregate level. If you're purely domestic-retail, the relief shows up differently: input costs stay easier than last year, even if your milk price isn't climbing the way you'd like.
One member who runs a mid-sized creamery in the upper Midwest put it to us plainly on a call last week: "I stopped watching the milk check every day and started watching my margin instead. The check moves around more than my costs do right now, and costs are the thing I can actually plan against." That's not a bad instinct for the summer ahead — a softer milk price with easing input costs is a margin story, not a revenue story, and it rewards members who are tracking cost per wheel rather than just price per hundredweight.
Butter and nonfat dry milk both eased on the week as well, which tends to loosen manufacturing-grade milk supply generally. Cheddar blocks came off slightly too, so don't expect the wholesale cheese case to firm up on its own; if anything, the near-term pressure stays flat to soft. The export strength is the thing keeping this from turning into a repeat of 2025's squeeze, not a rising tide lifting every part of the market.
If you price your own product against published market benchmarks, this is a good week to sit down with your numbers rather than react to the headline milk-price move. The Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of month — where the aggregate signal and your own cost sheet are telling two different stories — and a few seats are still open for the next cohort.
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.