If you sell overseas, you have probably felt this already: the order is placed, the wheels are ready, and the container that is supposed to carry them out of port is somewhere else, because it was more profitable for a carrier to send it back empty than to fill it with cheese. Members in our export-facing segment have been telling us the same story all summer, and it has only gotten louder heading into fall.
The irony is that demand has rarely looked better. The global dairy auction that cleared earlier this month showed cheddar prices up again and the broader index sitting roughly a third above where it was a year ago, an eight-year seasonal high by some measures. Cheese shipments are doing real work in that strength, with buyers abroad still hungry for product even as everything gets more expensive to move. That is the kind of headline that should make a small creamery's export plan easier to write. Instead, several members tell us they are quoting freight costs that have roughly doubled since last year, booking space weeks further out than usual, and in a few cases holding finished product in the cave longer than planned simply because there is nowhere for it to go yet.
The numbers back up what members are describing anecdotally. Container rates on some of the routes our exporters use most have nearly doubled over the past year, and industry trackers estimate container disruptions are now costing farm and food exporters several hundred million dollars a month in lost sales, mostly because carriers find it more profitable to send empty containers back to Asia for another round of imports than to fill them with outbound agricultural cargo. A wheel of cheese competing for space against that logic is not a fight most of our members can win on price alone.
It isn't just the container
Packaging has its own version of the same squeeze. Pallet costs climbed sharply this year as lumber prices spiked, and paper pulp — the stuff cheese boxes and case liners are made of — is running well above what it cost a year ago. None of this is particular to cheese, but a wheel of aged cheddar sitting an extra six weeks for a container is a different kind of problem than a pallet of dry goods sitting the same six weeks. Time is an ingredient here, and the current bottleneck is spending it for you.
Members who sell mostly at home are not fully insulated either. The same packaging inputs that are getting expensive for an exporter's crate are getting expensive for a domestic wholesale case, and a supplier squeeze anywhere in the chain tends to show up everywhere eventually. If you have not yet asked your packaging supplier for a fall forecast rather than a fall quote, that conversation is worth having now rather than in November.
We don't have a fix for global container flows — nobody does, and we'd be skeptical of anyone who claimed to. What we can do is pass along what's working for members who are getting product out anyway: booking further ahead than feels natural, building freight variance into quotes rather than absorbing it, and talking to buyers early about delivery windows instead of promising a date and hoping. A few members with domestic buyers have also told us this is the year they finally built out that channel properly, simply because it removed one more thing that could go wrong at the port.
For everything above, our Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding a steady stream of these questions and is a reasonable place to start if you want to compare notes with other exporters rather than guess alone.
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.