Two numbers came out of a recent survey of artisan and specialty cheesemakers that are worth sitting with together. Website sales as a share of total sales have roughly doubled since 2015. And the share of makers using unpasteurized milk for at least some of their cheese has dropped by nearly a fifth over the same stretch. Neither trend is a surprise on its own. Seeing them side by side is more interesting than either headline.
The first is a story we hear constantly in member calls: a shop that used to depend entirely on a wholesale account or a single farmers' market stand now ships direct, takes standing orders, and knows its own customer list for the first time. That is not a small operational shift. It changes how you plan inventory, how you write a label, and, frankly, how much of your margin you keep instead of handing to a distributor. If you have not looked at your own site's checkout flow since before the pandemic, this is a good week to do it — not because anything is wrong with it, but because the customer base doing this kind of buying has changed since you built it.
The second number is quieter and more worth watching. Fewer makers are working with raw milk at all, even as demand for the artisan category overall keeps climbing. Some of that is simple business math — a 60-day minimum aging requirement ties up cave space and cash for a category that can be a harder sell to some retail buyers. Some of it is a generational shift in who is opening a creamery right now and what they learned to make first. We are not going to tell you which side of that line to be on. We will say that if raw-milk cheese is core to your identity, the numbers suggest you are part of a shrinking, not growing, cohort — which can be a good story to tell a customer who wants something increasingly rare, or a hard one to justify to a lender who wants to see the category's trajectory.
The margin backdrop hasn't caught up yet
None of this is happening against an easy market. Milk prices spent much of the summer recovering from a rough stretch last year, and the most recent Class III reading was the highest in more than two years. That sounds like good news for the milk side of the ledger, and it is — but a rising milk price also raises the cost of the milk going into your vat if you are buying rather than milking your own herd. Members who source milk from a co-op or a neighboring dairy have told us this is exactly the kind of month where the retail price on the shelf and the actual margin on the wheel stop moving together.
If you sell direct, you have more room to adjust than a wholesale-only operation does — you can move your own price without renegotiating a contract. That is one more reason the website-sales trend and the margin story belong in the same conversation. The producers weathering this stretch best are often the ones who built a direct channel before they needed one.
What to do with this
If you have not run your numbers since spring, this is a reasonable week to do it: milk cost per pound of finished cheese, current retail or wholesale price, and what share of your volume now moves through your own site versus a distributor. If the shift toward direct sales is already showing up in your own ledger and you want a framework for pricing it properly, our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of math using real make-sheet examples. The next cohort is forming now — reach out through the member portal if you want a seat.
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.