Six weeks ago the question we kept getting was what to do with cheese nobody was buying. This week it's the opposite problem. As states loosen dining-room limits and restaurants start placing orders again, wholesale cheddar has climbed hard off its April floor, and more than one distributor member has told us they're scrambling to cover accounts they'd written off as gone for the year.
We want to be careful with this one, because the same swing that looks like relief from where we sit can look like whiplash from a production floor. Block cheddar was trading around a dollar a pound in mid-April, when food-service demand had collapsed and cold storage was filling up faster than anyone could move it. It's now well north of two dollars, and the futures curve members have been watching suggests the back half of the year holds up better than anyone expected in May. That's a real recovery. It is not the same as a normal June.
Reopening doesn't mean the old order pattern
If you sell into food service, treat this week's reorders as a restock, not a return to baseline. Dining rooms are reopening at reduced capacity in most of the states where our members ship, and a lot of that early volume is restaurants refilling coolers that have been empty since March rather than restaurants serving pre-pandemic covers. A buyer calling for a full pallet this week isn't necessarily telling you their business is back — they may just be telling you their walk-in is empty.
That distinction matters for how you plan production. Several members on our distributor and wholesale committees have asked whether to ramp make schedules back up to match this week's order volume. Our answer is the same one we gave in April when the case fell apart: build from what you can sell over the next several weeks, not from the size of one good order. A market that moved this fast on the way down can move fast in either direction on the way back.
Retail hasn't given back what it gained
The other piece worth watching is that retail cheese sales, which is where a lot of our smaller producer members shifted volume when food service closed, are still running well ahead of last June in the reporting we've seen. That's good news if you built a direct or retail channel this spring and don't want to abandon it the moment a food-service buyer calls. You don't have to choose. Several members have told us the retail relationships they built under pressure in April are outperforming their pre-pandemic wholesale accounts, and there's no reason to walk away from that just because a familiar buyer is back on the phone.
If you're recalibrating production for the summer, the Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course covers exactly this kind of channel math — what a pallet actually costs you to make and ship against what a food-service account versus a retail account is willing to pay for it. It's a useful gut check before you commit a make schedule to an order that might not repeat.
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.