Two weeks ago, most of you were making cheese for a market that included restaurants, hotel breakfast buffets, and school cafeterias. That market is largely gone for now. With dining rooms closed and campuses empty across most of the country, a channel that by some estimates carried close to half of U.S. dairy output has narrowed to takeout and delivery. We've heard from members this week who are looking at coolers full of wheels that were cut, sized, and priced for a foodservice account that isn't placing orders.
The imbalance is showing up furthest upstream first. Milk is perishable in a way that finished cheese isn't, and when a processor can't move it, the only release valve some farms have found is dumping raw milk they can't get picked up or paid for. That's a fluid-milk problem before it's a cheese problem, but it reaches you fast: co-ops under that kind of pressure are re-pricing loads, and spot milk has gotten cheaper and less predictable in the same week that packaging capacity for retail-sized formats has gotten scarcer. If your case runs on block or wheel product that needs to be cut down for a grocery shelf instead of a deli counter, you already know why that matters.
What's actually changing right now
A few things worth having straight before you make a pricing or production call:
- Retail demand hasn't collapsed — it's shifted. Grocery cheese sales are, by most accounts, holding up or even running ahead of a normal spring, which is not the same story as the foodservice side. If you can sell into that channel, the demand is there; the friction is packaging, not appetite.
- Federal relief moved fast, but is not tailored to food manufacturing yet. The relief package signed into law on March 27 opens payroll-support lending to small employers, cheese producers included, with a fairly wide eligibility bar and the possibility of loan forgiveness tied to keeping staff on payroll. It is not sector-specific dairy support, and it does not touch milk pricing. Treat it as a payroll bridge, not a market fix.
- Nothing about your make sheet needs to change. This is a demand and logistics shock, not a food-safety or quality event. The instinct to cut corners under financial pressure is understandable and one we'd ask you to resist.
Where we'd point your attention
If a chunk of your volume depended on a foodservice account that's gone quiet, the fastest lever most members have is repackaging and re-routing what you already have toward direct and retail channels rather than discounting into a wholesale market that's also under pressure. Our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of repricing decision — what a shortened channel does to your real margin, and how to reset a price list without guessing. If foodservice was a meaningful share of your business, it's worth an hour this week.
We don't have a clean read yet on how long this lasts. What we can tell you is that the federation is tracking relief-program eligibility questions as they come in and will keep this space updated as the picture firms up. If you have a specific question about your situation, reach out — we'd rather hear it now than after a decision's already made.
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.