Butter prices staged a strong rally through late May, jumping sharply on the spot dairy market in the final week of the month, and most read-outs had it holding near that level into June. That rally caught a lot of forecasters off guard — most going into the year had expected butter to soften, not climb. That's the kind of number that gets a headline. What it means for your make sheet is quieter, and worth walking through before it shows up as a surprise on next month's invoice.
Butter and cheese draw on the same milk stream. When butter pulls a premium, some of the cream that might otherwise have gone into a richer wheel gets bid away, and processors adjust their skim-versus-fat allocations accordingly. If you're buying cultures, rennet, or finished curd rather than milking your own herd, that shift can move your input cost even when your own region's milk price looks flat on paper.
Layered on top of that: this June's federal milk marketing order update changed how the Class I price is set, moving to whichever is higher between the Class III and Class IV skim milk value, along with revised make allowances for manufactured products. The net effect nudges Class III and IV prices down relative to the old formula. If your supply contract references a federal order class price — and a fair number of small-batch buying agreements do, even informally — this is the kind of change that's easy to miss until a quarterly reconciliation surfaces it.
Imports didn't take a summer off
The other half of the story is on the shelf, not the farm. Specialty cheese imports have been climbing for more than a year, and deli specialty cheese sales — the wedge-and-wheel case, not the sliced-and-shrink-wrapped one — have moved up in both volume and dollars. Buyers are telling us that Gouda and other washed-curd, semi-firm styles are pulling ahead of some varieties that had been reliable for years, while a few longtime shelf staples have softened.
None of that is bad news on its own. A growing specialty case is a case with room in it. But it does mean the competitive set your wheel sits next to on a retail shelf has more imported product in it than it did a year ago, often at price points shaped by currency and tariff conditions you don't control. If you haven't repriced your wholesale tiers since the input side moved, this is a reasonable week to do it — not to chase the market, but to make sure your margin reflects where your costs actually are today, not where they were at your last renewal.
Pull your last quarter's invoices for cultures, rennet, and any purchased curd, and check whether the unit cost has moved since the make-allowance update took effect. If you sell into a market where washed-curd or aged styles are gaining shelf space, it may be worth entering — or re-entering — a category you'd stepped back from. And if pricing your own wheel against a shifting import picture feels like guesswork, our course on pricing and margin for specialty cheese walks through exactly this kind of input-to-shelf-price exercise with real make-sheet numbers, not textbook ones.
We'll keep tracking the federal order changes as they settle in over the summer. If your contracts reference class prices directly, loop in whoever manages that paperwork now rather than at your next renewal — it's a much smaller conversation before the numbers move than after.
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.