Every year-end trade summary we read this winter says roughly the same thing: premium and artisan cheese demand kept growing through 2022, and the specialty case is a bigger, more competitive piece of the dairy shelf than it was five years ago. That's good news for members who've spent a decade building a brand around a distinctive wheel. It's also the reason we want to flag a quieter number in the same research, because it points a different direction than the headline.
Industry surveys of specialty and artisan producers have been tracking a steady narrowing of product lines since 2019 — makers offering fewer distinct cheeses than they did at the last peak, not more. That's not the same story as a shrinking industry. It's a maturing one, where the makers who are growing fastest are often the ones who picked two or three wheels and got very good at selling them, rather than the ones running twelve SKUs across a wholesale line.
That narrowing shows up in the milk numbers too. Farmgate reporting out of the first days of the year points to a softer milk price than producers saw at last year's peak, which changes the math on carrying a wide, slow-moving lineup. A cheese that sells steadily but slowly ties up milk, cave space, and labor for months before it earns its keep, and when the input cost cushion is thinner, that carrying cost matters more than it did during 2021's runup. Several members who called the office this month were asking less about adding a new cheese and more about which existing one to retire.
What that means at your bench
If you've been eyeing a new addition to the lineup for this spring, the research is a reasonable nudge to ask a sharper question first: does this new cheese widen your customer base, or does it just split your existing production time across one more thing to age, label, and sell? Members who've told us their margins improved over the last two years are, more often than not, the ones who cut something rather than added it.
The same surveys note that a maker's own website has become a real sales channel in a way it wasn't a decade ago — direct-to-consumer sales through a producer's own site have roughly doubled their share since the mid-2010s. For a small creamery, that's worth weighing against wholesale expansion when you're deciding where the next hour of a limited staff's time goes. A tighter, well-photographed lineup sold direct can outperform a broader one sitting in someone else's case.
None of this means wholesale is a bad channel — for members who've built steady relationships with a distributor or a regional grocer, that relationship is worth protecting, not walking away from over one soft quarter. It's more that the calculation has shifted. A few years ago, being in more places with more cheeses was itself a growth strategy. This year, the members telling us their numbers actually improved are the ones who picked their best-performing wheels, made sure those wheels were priced to reflect a fair look at true cost, and put the freed-up time into the accounts and channels already working rather than chasing a new one.
If your case has grown by accretion — a holiday special that never got retired, a wholesale-only cheese nobody's asked about since summer — this is a reasonable month to run the numbers on each one honestly. Production hours, cave space, and packaging cost are all real inputs, and a wheel that isn't covering them is quietly subsidized by the ones that are.
Where the federation can help
If you're trying to figure out whether to consolidate, expand, or hold steady, that's exactly the kind of question the Membership & Outreach Committee fields from members at this time of year, and our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through the math behind a lineup decision rather than a gut call. Either is a better first stop than guessing at what the case down the road is doing.
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.