The cheese case at a specialty retailer runs on a buyer's judgment more than anything else, and this member's judgment has always leaned European. Her shop built its reputation on a rotating slate of imported alpine wheels and washed-rind cheeses sourced through a specialty importer, and for years that was the thing regulars came in asking about by name. This year, for the first time, she's spending as much time on her domestic list as her import one.
It isn't that the imported cheese stopped selling. It's that the landed cost has gotten harder to predict from one order to the next, and a case that depends on a handful of import lines is a case that's exposed when trade terms shift mid-quarter. "I used to plan a season," she told us. "Now I plan an order." That's not a complaint so much as a description of how the job has changed — and it's a description a lot of our retail and specialty-buyer members will recognize this year.
Some of what she's navigating is straightforward paperwork creep rather than anything dramatic. Import licensing fees and quota categories shift most years, a little more than they used to, and it's the kind of small, recurring cost that used to be a rounding error and now gets its own line in her budget planning. None of it is any one thing she can point to and say "that's the problem." It's a dozen small things, each a little less predictable than it was two years ago.
Building a backup case, not a replacement one
What she's landed on isn't abandoning imports — her regulars would notice, and she'd rather not find out how fast. Instead she's spent the summer identifying two or three domestic makers per category who can sit next to the import on the same shelf: a washed-rind from a Midwest creamery next to the French wheel, a blue from a mountain-region producer as a second option to the classic. When an order comes in late or a landed cost jumps, she has something to point a customer toward instead of an empty spot in the case.
Finding those makers took real legwork — reading the exhibitor list at the spring competition, asking distributors who else was shipping reliably, tasting blind against her existing lineup rather than assuming an import needed defending on reputation alone. She says the tasting was the easy part. The harder part was rebuilding supplier relationships from scratch after years of the same handful of calls.
What we're hearing from other buyers
She's not alone in this. Several members in retail and specialty-buyer roles have told us this year that they're diversifying their supplier list for the same reason — not politics, just risk. A case that leans on one country's trade terms is a case with a single point of failure, and this year has been a reminder of that in a way that recent years hadn't forced. For a domestic maker, that same shift is an opening: buyers who never used to call are calling now, and a good sample box sent in July can turn into a standing order by fall.
If you're a buyer working through something similar, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course touches on building supplier relationships from the producer side, which is useful context even if you're sitting on the retail side of the counter. And if you've found a domestic maker worth other members knowing about, tell your regional rep — we're always looking for names to pass along when another buyer asks the same question she was asking in June.
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.