For most of this year, members have been calling us about the same number: cheddar. Global cheddar prices slid to a five-year low earlier this season, and for a while it looked like the kind of slide that keeps going. It didn't. Cash block prices held in the mid-$1.60s a pound through mid-July, and barrels moved the same direction, up a few cents on the week rather than down. That is a small thing to celebrate, but after 2025, small and stable is worth noticing out loud.
The reason isn't a shortage. Production is up — federal reporting shows cheese output running roughly 2% ahead of last July, with Italian-style varieties leading that growth. More milk, more cheese, and yet the price line flattened instead of falling further. The clearest explanation members have relayed to us from their own supply conversations is that a larger corn crop and a big soybean crush have kept feed costs down all year, which took some of the pressure off makers who might otherwise have been forced to sell into a falling market just to cover costs. When your cost side eases even a little, you can afford to hold a price instead of chasing volume.
What eased, and what didn't
Feed wasn't the whole story. Energy costs spiked hard in the spring — several members mentioned diesel and propane bills that jumped sharply around the same stretch — and have only partly come back down since. So this isn't a return to 2019-style comfort. It's closer to a truce: milk supply growing steadily, an all-milk price forecast that's easing rather than collapsing, and a cheese market absorbing the extra volume without a further price break. If you sell wholesale under a contract that resets seasonally, this is the kind of quarter where the reset number should look flat to slightly better, not another cut.
For farmstead and small-batch members, the practical read is this: if your own margin math has been assuming a continued cheddar slide, it's worth rerunning it against the last six weeks of actual settlement prices rather than the spring low. A few members who locked in supplier or retail pricing back in April told us they're now revisiting those numbers, because the floor they were bracing for didn't fully arrive.
Watching the back half of the year
None of this is a promise. Milk production is still climbing nationally, and a bigger fall flush could put fresh downward pressure on block prices before winter. What we're hearing from members is cautious relief, not celebration — the kind of quarter where you catch up on deferred maintenance rather than expand. If your creamery uses a formal margin coverage tool or a forward contract, this is a reasonable window to review the assumptions behind it with whoever runs your numbers, using this summer's settlement data rather than last year's.
If you want a second set of eyes on how this compares with your own regional pricing, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding these questions all season — a note to the committee is the fastest way to get a straight answer.
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.