One of our longtime members works regional sales for a traditional cheddar producer, and this fall he's fielding a call he says he hasn't gotten this often since his second year in the business: a buyer wanting to know why their order is three weeks late and whether it's coming at all.
"It's not one thing breaking," he told us. "It's pallets, it's trucking capacity, it's a port backlog that has nothing to do with cheese and everything to do with cheese getting where it needs to go. I had an account last week ask me if we'd stopped making cheddar. We hadn't. It was sitting on a dock two states over."
What two decades teaches you about a bad month
He's been through tight years before — a feed price spike, a recall scare that wasn't his company's fault but hit the whole category anyway, a distributor that folded mid-contract. What he says hasn't changed is the order in which he handles a bad month: confirm what's actually true before promising anything, tell the account the true number even when it's worse than they want, and never let a delay turn into a guessing game.
"The accounts that panic are the ones who don't hear from you," he said. "I'd rather call someone and say 'this is two weeks out, here's why' than let them find out from an empty shelf. That's true whether it's a supply problem or a pricing problem. Silence is what actually costs you the account."
He's also candid that this fall's disruption is bigger than anything specific to cheese. National coverage through mid-October has been describing food and consumer goods shortages broadly, tied to port congestion, container shortages, and a truck driver shortfall that predates the pandemic. His read is that members should plan around the system being slow, not around any single fix arriving quickly.
What he tells newer members
For members newer to wholesale relationships, his advice is blunt: build slack into your promises before you need it. "If your normal lead time is two weeks, tell new accounts it's three right now, and beat it. Don't tell them two and miss it. You only get to reset that trust once before they start ordering from someone else as a hedge, even if they like you better."
He's also a believer in over-communicating around the holidays specifically, when demand is highest and a shipping delay is least forgivable. "November and December, nobody wants to hear 'we're working on it.' They want a date. Give them the honest one, even if it's not the one they were hoping for."
Members navigating their own fall supply questions can find this kind of straight-talk approach echoed in past coverage of the container shortage on our blog, and members building out a wholesale book for the first time can reach out through the Membership & Outreach Committee to be paired with a veteran willing to talk through a rough patch.
He's quick to add that none of this is a reason to panic on price. A late shipment is a scheduling problem, not proof that your supplier is struggling, and conflating the two with an account can do more damage than the delay itself. Keep the two conversations separate, he says, and most accounts will stay patient through a season that's testing everyone's calendar at once.
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.