For most of the last two years, the import case at Mongers' Row was the section the wholesale buyer avoided restocking too eagerly. A round of tariffs on European cheese, layered onto an already unpredictable shipping calendar, meant a wheel that priced out fine in one order could arrive priced out of reach by the next. She trimmed the case down to a handful of reliable lines and waited.
This summer the calculation changed. A tariff truce on a set of European goods, including several dairy lines, took effect earlier this year, and she's spent the past few weeks doing something she hadn't done since before the tariffs went on: actually calling suppliers to ask what's coming back.
Slower than flipping a switch
"It's not like the case just refills," she told us on a call this week. Some of the importers who used to carry her smaller specialty lines shifted their businesses elsewhere during the two years of higher costs, and a few haven't come back. The truce removed the tariff; it didn't undo two years of a smaller, more consolidated European import market. So the rebuilding is happening one relationship at a time, and some of it is starting over rather than picking up where it left off.
She's also had to relearn her own math. For two years, her landed cost on a European wheel included a markup she'd stopped bothering to itemize for customers — it was just the price. Now that the extra charge is gone, she's had to recalculate shelf pricing on lines she never fully repriced downward when costs first spiked, because a few crept up for reasons that had nothing to do with the tariff. Untangling which increase was the tariff and which was just two years of everything getting more expensive has taken longer than she expected.
What has come back faster than she expected is customer interest. Regulars who'd gotten used to a domestic-heavy case have been asking, unprompted, whether specific wheels are back. She's treating that as a signal worth acting on, even if the supply side is still catching up. A few had started substituting a domestic alpine-style for a European original they used to buy without thinking twice, and she's curious whether they'll switch back once both are sitting in the case side by side, or whether two years was long enough to change the habit for good.
What she's watching now
Her current approach is to add slowly and watch sell-through before committing to standing orders — a change from the pre-tariff pattern of locking in larger volumes on longer lead times. "I got burned once assuming a price would hold," she said. "I'm not doing six-month commitments again until I trust the number." It's a more conservative posture than the case had three years ago, but one that several of our members in wholesale and retail roles have told us they're adopting for the same reason: predictability, not just price, is what they're buying now.
She's also leaning on the federation's advocacy updates more than she used to, mostly to know before her suppliers do when a trade change is coming. If you're in a similar seat — rebuilding a case, a supplier list, or a customer base that shrank under two years of cost pressure — that's exactly the kind of member story we want to hear. It's useful to us for advocacy, and honestly, it's useful for other members trying to figure out whether they're the only ones moving slowly on purpose.
If you want to trade notes with other buyers doing the same work, our Membership & Outreach Committee keeps an informal list of members happy to compare notes on import sourcing. Reach out and we'll make the introduction.
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.