Monday's post walked through why block cheese fell out of its own record high in three weeks flat, from above $3.00 a pound in mid-July to the low $1.90s this week. This one is about what to actually do with that information, because "the board moved" is not a pricing strategy, and a lot of members are discovering that the hard way this summer.
Most of the calls our education team has fielded lately share the same shape. A member sets a wholesale price in June based on where the board sat that week. By August the board has moved a dollar and their buyer is asking why the invoice doesn't match. Nobody did anything wrong — the board really did move that much — but a price sheet built on a single week's commodity number was never going to hold, in either direction.
Cost, not commodity, is your floor
Our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course starts from a different question than "what's the board doing": what does a pound actually cost you to make, land, and sell? That means milk cost per pound of finished cheese, yield loss through aging, labor per batch, packaging, cold storage, and a realistic share of your fixed costs — rent on the cave, insurance, the truck. Add your margin on top of that, and you have a floor price that doesn't move every time a federal purchase program shifts the board.
The commodity board still matters — it's a real input if you buy any wholesale curd, and it shapes what your buyers expect to pay for cheese generally. But it should set your ceiling and your competitive read, not your floor. A small producer we talked with this week described switching to a quarterly review instead of chasing the board weekly: "I used to check the board every morning like it was going to tell me something about my own cheese. It wasn't. It was telling me about milk supply and a food-box contract I'm not part of."
That distinction matters more this year than most. A board that can rally a dollar off a purchase program and then hand it all back inside a month isn't describing your case, your customers, or your costs. It's describing federal purchasing and restaurant reopenings, two things your price sheet shouldn't be reacting to on a weekly basis.
What the course actually covers
Four sessions: building your true cost per pound, setting margin targets by channel (wholesale, farmers' market, direct-to-consumer), reading a commodity board without over-reacting to it, and renegotiating an existing wholesale contract without losing the account. It runs live with a small cohort so you can bring your own numbers and work through them with an instructor, not just a spreadsheet template.
The renegotiation session tends to be the one members ask about most. If you signed a contract in the spring at a price that no longer reflects your costs — up or down — walking away isn't usually realistic, and neither is eating the difference indefinitely. The course covers how to bring a buyer a revised number backed by your own cost data rather than a general complaint about the market, which is a much easier conversation to have and a much easier one for a buyer to say yes to.
If your price sheet hasn't been touched since spring, or if this week's board swing left you unsure whether to move your own prices at all, this is the week to enroll. Reach out to the Education Committee for the next available cohort date, and bring last month's invoices — the course works best when you're pricing your own cheese, not a hypothetical one.
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.