For most of last year, our members in wholesale and food service were the ones we worried about hardest. This spring the numbers have finally started to say something different. Class III milk, which was sitting near $15.75 back in February, has climbed past $17.50 and looks likely to close out May well above that. The reason isn't a mystery: cheese demand strengthened sharply through late April and into May, driven partly by a federal food-box purchase program winding down at month's end and partly by something more durable — restaurants filling back up.
If you've been watching the futures market rather than just the announced price, you've probably noticed how choppy the last few months have been: a strong export-driven rally in one report, milk output surprising to the upside in the next, cheese prices giving a little of it back before climbing again. That volatility is normal for spring and it is not, on its own, a reason to change how you price. It's a reason to check your formulas more often than you might in a quieter season.
Dining rooms have been reopening state by state since March, and diner counts in some regions are running well ahead of pre-pandemic levels for this time of year. That is unevenly distributed — some states are still capped, others have lifted every restriction — but the direction is consistent, and it is showing up in cheese pulls. If you sell wholesale to restaurants, delis, or foodservice distributors, this is the first spring in two years where you can plan a reorder cadence around actual reopening rather than a maybe.
What a firmer Class III means for your contracts
A rising Class III price changes two things members ask us about every spring: your milk cost, if you're buying, and your pricing power, if you're selling finished cheese into a market that's suddenly less soft than it was in February. Neither of those is a reason to rip up a spring price sheet mid-season. It is a reason to look at any formula-priced contracts you're renewing this quarter and make sure the formula still reflects where the market actually is, not where it was when you wrote it in January.
We'd also gently note: production is up too, an estimated 4.6% higher in May than a year ago, with milk cow numbers continuing to inch upward. A price recovery riding alongside more milk on the ground is good news, but it's not a guarantee the recovery holds through summer. If your creamery took on debt or deferred maintenance during the lean months, this is a reasonable window to catch up rather than to lock in new fixed costs on the assumption that the curve keeps climbing.
The wholesale relationships that thinned out
A few members have told us their hardest task this spring isn't production, it's rebuilding accounts that went quiet in 2020. If a distributor dropped your line when their restaurant customers closed, they may not have automatically added you back now that those same customers are reopening. Reaching out this month, with a specific reorder ask rather than a general "how are things," has worked better for the members who've tried it than waiting to be remembered.
None of this is advice to overproduce into a market that could still soften. It is a note that, for the first time in a while, the wholesale side of this business has a tailwind worth planning around. If your creamery works this channel, the Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through re-forecasting a season mid-stream, and it's a good fit for exactly this moment.
There's also a grilling-season angle worth a sentence: process and melt-forward cheeses tend to see a seasonal bump as warmer weather arrives, on top of whatever the food-service recovery is doing. If your product line includes something built for a sandwich press or a burger, this is a reasonable month to make sure your distributor has enough on hand going into June rather than finding out in three weeks that you undersupplied a category you didn't think to watch.
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.