Trade reporting this fall has specialty cheese sales up double digits across most retail channels compared with a year ago, and several members told us on last week's call that their own numbers are tracking the same direction. Gift-oriented shopping is a real part of that lift — coverage of this year's holiday gifting trends has cheese and charcuterie showing up again and again as the low-effort, high-payoff gift, which is good news if you've got anything set aside for a curated box. That is a good problem to have in late October, but it is still a problem: the wheels you are aging right now are the wheels you will be selling in gift boxes seven weeks from now, and a stronger case means a tighter window to get the mix right.
Milk supply has been part of the story too. The federal government's most recent dairy outlook has domestic milk production running close to flat against last year, with the shortfall concentrated in a few regions still working through fewer replacement heifers and a milder-than-hoped bump in yield per cow. That's kept milk prices firmer than members expected back in the spring. Firmer milk hasn't fully translated into higher cheese prices at wholesale, so the margin most of you are watching sits in the middle: better top-line demand, a milk cost that isn't falling to meet it.
What to hold, what to move
If you make anything meant to age past 90 days, this is the week to look hard at your inventory and ask which wheels are holiday candidates and which need to move now while the case is busy. A few things members have mentioned working through:
- Gift-format wheels — smaller formats and wrapped wedges move faster in December than a full wheel on the counter. If you haven't committed cave space to a gift run yet, the next two weeks are close to the last reasonable window for anything that needs six-plus weeks to finish.
- Case turnover on younger cheeses — with demand up, younger, faster-moving styles are the ones covering payroll between now and the holiday bump. Don't let the excitement about aged inventory pull attention off what's actually paying the bills day to day.
- Buyer conversations now, not in December — retail buyers are building their holiday orders over the next few weeks. If a wholesale account hasn't heard from you about what you'll have ready, that's a call worth making before Thanksgiving, not after.
The margin question underneath it
None of this changes what your own cost sheet says, and we're not going to put a number on your margin for you — that's between you, your ledger, and whoever helps you price. What we can say is that members who came through last year's tighter stretch with a clear sense of their break-even per wheel are the ones who told us they felt in control of this fall's pricing conversations, rather than reacting to whatever the buyer offered first.
If you haven't run that math since spring, now is a reasonable time to redo it before the holiday orders lock in. The Education Committee has fielded a few questions along these lines and can point you toward members willing to talk through how they built their own worksheet — reach out through the member directory if that would help.
Whatever this season brings your case, we'd rather hear about it from you directly than read it in a trade report next spring. Drop us a note about how the holiday build is going; it helps us know what to cover next.
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.