If you've been pricing your November case off a September number, stop. The market moved this month, and members who caught it early are already reordering.
Two-week average product prices for October settled around $1.62 per pound for cheese, with butter pushing past $1.77. The Class I base price for the month came in near $17.08 per hundredweight, up roughly half a dollar from September. That's a real move, not noise, and it's the kind of thing that shows up in your margin before it shows up in a headline.
Why the case is filling early
Year-over-year growth in the national milk supply has been sliding since August, and by October it had dropped below where it stood a year earlier. Slower supply growth against steady demand is generally supportive for price, and members selling into wholesale accounts have told us they're seeing firmer offers than they expected going into the fourth quarter. A few have also flagged shipping delays as a factor pushing buyers to lock in cheese earlier than usual — nobody wants to find out their December order is stuck at a port in the third week of November.
There's also a demand story underneath the price story. Specialty cheese has had a genuinely strong year at retail, with dollar sales in the category up close to 3% over the twelve months ending in early September even as unit sales held roughly flat. That gap between dollars and units usually means one thing: shoppers are trading up, buying fewer wedges but pricier ones. If your case skews toward aged, washed-rind, or anything with a story attached, that's the shopper you're stocking for.
What to do with this before Thanksgiving
A few practical notes members have raised with us this month:
- Reprice before you reorder, not after. If your wholesale contracts reset quarterly, this is the window to bring them in line with where the market actually sits, not where it sat when you signed.
- Talk to your distributor about lead times now. Several members working with regional distribution partners report longer windows between order and delivery than a year ago. A week of slack in your ordering calendar is cheap insurance against an empty case on a Saturday.
- Don't confuse a firm market with a guaranteed one. Butter and cheese have moved in different directions before, sometimes within the same month. Watch both, and don't build your fourth-quarter plan around a single data point.
If you want a second set of eyes on your pricing before the holiday rush, the Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course runs a cohort that walks through exactly this kind of quarter-to-quarter repricing decision. Details are on the course calendar.
Judging shows are another read on where the category's energy is right now. This month's international competition circuit drew a record entry count from producers spread across dozens of countries, which tells us something beyond bragging rights: makers are still investing in new releases and entering them into scrutiny, even with shipping costs higher than they were two years ago. That's not the behavior of an industry hunkering down. It's the behavior of one that expects the shelf to keep rewarding quality through the holidays.
None of this is a guarantee. Production reports later in the quarter will tell us whether cheese output kept pace with the firmer prices, and a supply surprise in either direction could undo some of what's built up in the case right now. But for members deciding this week whether to lock in a wholesale order or wait another cycle, the weight of the evidence leans toward locking it in. Waiting on a softer number that may not come is its own kind of risk, especially with the calendar this close to Thanksgiving.
If your creamery sells direct as well as wholesale, keep an eye on your own numbers against these regional ones rather than assuming they move together. A firm national cheese price doesn't always translate into a firm price for your specific style in your specific region, particularly if you're competing with imports that are also chasing the same holiday shelf space.
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.