Two numbers crossed our desk this week that describe the same industry from opposite directions. Retail cheese sales are running well into double-digit growth over last year — shoppers are cooking more, buying more cheese to do it, and reaching for wedges and wheels they might have skipped before. Meanwhile, a business news segment this week described the restaurant recovery as stalled: after a summer of slow gains, sales at eating and drinking places have flattened out and remain well below where they sat before the pandemic.
If your business sells through a grocery case, you are probably having a good fall. If it sells through a dining room, you are not, and the fact that both are true at once is the defining fact of this stretch of the pandemic for cheesemakers. Several members who supply restaurant accounts told us this week that orders they expected to firm up by autumn are instead flat or shrinking again, as a new wave of dining restrictions moves through parts of Europe and case counts climb here as well.
The food box is buying again
A federal program that has been purchasing surplus dairy for food banks since spring announced a new round of contracts this week, worth roughly half a billion dollars, for delivery between November and the end of the year. Cheese has been a substantial share of every round so far — hard and semi-firm styles travel well and hold up in a box that sits in a truck for a day. A few of our distributor members have already asked us how smaller producers get on a bid list for a future round; the honest answer is that the paperwork favors larger volume, but a member who can supply through an existing distributor relationship has a real shot. Talk to your distributor first, not the program directly.
We are not going to pretend this program is a substitute for a functioning restaurant sector. It moves real cheese and it has kept some coolers from filling up past capacity, but it is a bridge, not a repair. Members who have leaned on it this year describe it as useful cash flow in a bad quarter, not a new sales channel to plan around for next year.
What to watch heading into the holidays
Grocery demand tends to climb further from here regardless of what the pandemic does — Thanksgiving and December are always cheese's best retail months. The open question is whether that seasonal bump is enough to offset a foodservice sector that may tighten further if case counts keep climbing the way they have the past few weeks. A few members are hedging by shifting production mix toward retail-format cuts now, while there's still time to adjust before the holiday order window closes.
If you supply both channels, this is a good week to look hard at your production calendar rather than assume last year's split between retail and foodservice orders will repeat. If you only supply one, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding calls from members looking to make new distributor connections in the other channel — reach out if that would be useful to you before the holiday planning window closes.
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.