A recent industry survey of specialty and artisan makers turned up a pattern worth sitting with: producers are, on average, making fewer distinct cheese varieties than they were a few years ago, while the share of sales going direct to the customer — farm store, farmers' market, online order — has climbed sharply. Those two trends usually don't travel together, so it's worth asking what's actually driving them.
Doing less, better
For years the story in this trade was expansion: a maker who started with one cheddar adding a washed-rind, then a blue, then a bloomy-rind wheel, building out a case that could anchor a whole booth by itself. The recent pullback in variety looks less like retreat and more like triage. Running a smaller, tighter lineup means less time split across recipes, fewer make days lost to a format that never quite found its market, and a cave that's easier to manage when you're not juggling six different affinage schedules at once. Several members who've made this call told us the same thing in different words: cutting a slow-moving variety freed up enough capacity to actually grow the ones that were already working.
That's not a universal prescription — a mixed case is still the right call for a producer selling wholesale into a shop that wants variety on one shelf. But for a small operation stretched thin on labor, a narrower lineup sold with real conviction can outperform a wide one sold thin.
Selling it yourself
The direct-to-consumer shift is the more consistent thread across member conversations this winter. More than half of surveyed producers now sell the majority of their cheese directly rather than through a distributor, up sharply from where that number sat less than a decade ago. Part of that is simple economics — cutting out a wholesale margin matters more when input costs are climbing the way they have been. Part of it is that customers have gotten more comfortable buying specialty cheese online or straight from a farm stand than they were before, and a maker with a decent website and a reliable shipping process can capture that demand without waiting for a distributor relationship to develop.
"We didn't set out to go direct," one small-batch producer told us. "It just turned out that the wholesale accounts we could get paid less per pound than the customers who found us at the market, so the shift was less a strategy and more just following where the better price was." That's a common thread — this looks less like a coordinated industry pivot and more like a lot of individual producers reaching the same conclusion on their own timeline.
If you're considering trimming your own lineup or leaning harder into direct sales, the trade-off is real: direct channels take marketing time and fulfillment infrastructure that wholesale doesn't require, and a narrower case can leave you exposed if your one or two flagship cheeses hit a rough batch. The Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course walks through building that infrastructure without letting it eat your make schedule, and the Membership & Outreach Committee can connect you with members further along that path who're happy to compare notes on what worked and what they'd do differently.
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.