A new industry study on the US artisan and specialty cheese sector landed this winter, and the number that jumped out to us wasn't the growth figure — it was the size figure. The count of active artisan and specialty cheesemakers nationally is now approaching a thousand, and roughly three in four of them report annual production of 50,000 pounds or less. That's not a rounding error in an industry dominated by a handful of large processors. That's most of the industry, and it's most of our membership.
Small isn't a phase, it's the shape of the business
We hear from members occasionally who assume their production volume puts them outside the "real" industry conversation — that the trade data, the trend pieces, and the policy debates are really about operations ten times their size. This study says otherwise. A sector where three-quarters of active makers are working at under 50,000 pounds a year is a sector built on small operations, not one where small operations are the exception waiting to scale up or wash out.
That matters for how we plan programming. A workshop on cave design for a 500-pound-a-week producer needs different content than one aimed at a plant running multiple shifts, and a course on pricing has to assume a make sheet with real hands-on labor in it, not a spreadsheet built around commodity-scale inputs. When our Education Committee builds a syllabus, this is the membership they're building it for, and this study is a useful gut-check on whether we're getting that right.
What's driving the growth
The study points to consumer interest in traditional methods and naturally handled, locally identifiable products as the engine behind the sector's growth, rather than any single company or channel expanding. That's consistent with what members tell us directly: the shoppers walking up to a specialty counter increasingly want to know who made a cheese and how, not just what style it is. For a small producer, that's an opening — a customer asking a provenance question is a customer who's already primed to hear your actual story, if you're prepared to tell it clearly.
It's also a reminder that "small" and "growing" aren't opposites in this business. A maker producing under 50,000 pounds a year can still be adding a wholesale account, a new retail line, or a second seasonal style each year — growth that shows up in your order book long before it shows up in an industry-wide volume statistic. Trade coverage of the specialty sector has made a related point before: small cheesemakers face a different set of business challenges than large-scale processors, not a smaller version of the same ones, and distribution channel tends to be one of the bigger constraints. A cheese that sells out at the farmers' market every weekend can still struggle to find shelf space at a grocery account with different case-fee and slotting expectations.
A federal value-added producer grant program is also worth a look if the growth you're planning requires real capital — a workshop on it ran earlier this month, and the program lets a producer count the value of their own farm milk toward the matching-funds requirement, which lowers the cash bar for a small operation weighing a first cheese line.
That's worth sitting with if your own plans for this year involve moving beyond direct sales. Wholesale and retail distribution work by a different set of rules than a farm stand or a farmers' market booth — order minimums, delivery schedules, payment terms — and a maker who's never navigated them can lose real margin figuring it out live with a new account. If this is the shape of the industry you're actually operating in, our Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing course is built specifically around translating a small operation's real practices into the kind of narrative a specialty counter customer responds to, and our Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course covers the channel-side questions this study raises before you're negotiating your first wholesale contract. Neither is a large lift, and both start with writing down what you already do differently, not inventing a story from scratch.
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.