Happy new year, and a quieter one on the milk-price front than the last few. Early reporting out of federal order territory shows January mailbox prices coming in below where they sat in December — not a collapse, but a real step down after a run of records last year. Market watchers had been flagging more milk and softer prices as the likely shape of 2023 for weeks before the new year turned over, so this isn't exactly a surprise to anyone who was paying attention over the holidays. It's still worth a plan.
If you locked in fall wholesale contracts on the assumption that the top of the market would hold, this week is a good time to check the assumption, not the contract. We heard from a handful of members who'd already started penciling out spring numbers before the break, and the consistent question was some version of: does this pullback change what we should be quoting for March and April deliveries? We don't have a house answer, because the honest one is that it depends on your own cost basis, and that's exactly where the risk sits. A raw milk cost that felt fixed in November can move under you before your printed price list catches up.
What we'd actually check this week
Start with your last twelve months of raw milk cost against your wholesale and retail pricing, side by side. If the two lines have been drifting apart quietly, January is a cheap month to notice it — before a spring order comes in at a number you set in a different market. Our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this exercise, and a new cohort typically opens in the first quarter; watch the course calendar or ask your account contact for the next start date.
If you produce your own milk, this is also the month to double-check your federal margin coverage enrollment, since the sign-up window for the year closes at the end of January — worth a calendar reminder if you haven't already filed.
Feed costs are the other half of this. Several members in the upper Midwest and Northeast told us feed hasn't come down anywhere near as fast as milk prices have started to move, which squeezes farmstead operations from both directions — the milk they buy or produce, and the milk their herd converts into. If that's your situation, this is worth flagging to your accountant now, not at tax time, since it changes what a "normal" quarter looks like for cash flow planning.
The case itself is calmer than the ledger
Retail demand held up better than some of us expected through the holidays — several members reported cheese cases moving at a steady clip through late December, gift boxes especially. That's the encouraging half of this story: shoppers are still reaching for a wedge of something interesting even with grocery budgets tighter than they were two years ago. The tension is between a retail side that's behaving normally and a wholesale and input side that's still finding its footing for the new year. Watching both, rather than assuming one tells you about the other, is the safer habit going into 2023.
It's also a reminder that a single national number rarely describes your own creamery. A federal order average is useful context, not a substitute for your own ledger. If your numbers don't reconcile the way you'd expect against what you're reading in the trade press, our Membership & Outreach Committee fields these questions regularly and can usually point you to a member who's solved a similar puzzle this same month in a past year. Reach out through the member portal, and we'll make the introduction.
We'll keep watching this one through the quarter. If the pullback deepens rather than levels off, we'll flag it again with whatever your account contacts are seeing on the ground, since that's usually a faster read than any single published index.
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.