Two numbers came out of December worth reading together instead of apart. On the commodity side, forty-pound cheese blocks eased through the month, landing below both November and a year earlier; Class III milk followed the same direction, down from where it sat in November. On the retail side, specialty cheese closed out the year having grown again, with segment sales up roughly 6 percent over the prior year. Softer input costs and stronger finished-goods demand rarely show up in the same month by accident, and for a lot of our members, the two together are the actual story of how 2024 ends.
If you sell mostly at wholesale on commodity contracts, the softer block market is the number that matters to your December statement, and it's worth checking now rather than in March whether your pricing already reflects it. If you sell direct, at a counter, or through a specialty distributor, the retail growth number is closer to what you actually felt this month — a full case, steady gift-box orders, a holiday rush that behaved like the last two holiday rushes rather than a down year.
Why the gap between those two markets keeps widening
This isn't a new pattern for members who've been with us through the last couple of artisan-boom years, but December makes it unusually visible. Commodity cheese pricing tracks bulk supply and demand — how much milk the national herd produced, how much of it went into block and barrel versus butter or powder. Specialty cheese pricing tracks something closer to what your case looks like: provenance, story, the fact that a buyer picked your wheel off a shelf next to four others and chose yours. Feed costs eased for a lot of producers this year, milk production grew, and that pushed commodity prices down — while none of that touched the demand side of a well-run specialty case, which is why the specialty segment kept growing right through it.
A small farmstead creamery selling wholesale into commodity contracts and a farmstead creamery selling direct at markets and through a specialty distributor can have completely different Decembers even sitting forty miles apart, and both readings are correct. If your books look soft this month and you're only watching the commodity number, it's worth asking whether more of your volume could move toward the second market instead of assuming the whole industry had a flat year — because on the specialty side, it mostly didn't.
What we're watching into January
The federal outlook released alongside December's numbers points to continued growth in milk production through early 2025, which typically keeps downward pressure on commodity block and butter prices for a while longer. We don't have a read yet on whether specialty demand holds through a full calendar quarter of softer commodity pricing — that's usually the more interesting question than either number alone. If your case had a strong December, an unusually quiet one, or something in between, the Membership & Outreach Committee is collecting exactly that kind of year-end read from members through mid-January, and it's one of the better inputs we get for next year's course and event calendar.
Wishing everyone a clean closeout on the books this week, whichever market you're mostly selling into.
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.