Not every member story this spring is about a shortage or a struggle. One of our retail members — a cheesemonger at a specialty shop in the upper Midwest, in business a little over a decade — told us her case has been busier this year than she can remember it being. Customers are trading up, asking more questions, staying longer at the counter. Trade reporting this spring backs up what she's seeing: retail cheese sales have stayed well above their pre-pandemic baseline, with shredded cheese volumes climbing even faster than the category overall. By most measures that's the good problem to have.
It just doesn't feel entirely good from where she's standing behind the register.
"Sales are up. Nobody's disputing that," she said. "What's harder to explain to a regular is why the wedge that cost them twelve dollars last spring costs them fifteen now, when I'm the one who has to say it out loud every time." Wholesale cost has climbed steadily since last year, tracking a milk market that's been running well above its usual range for months, and her supplier invoices haven't waited for her to catch up on repricing the case. Industry reporting suggests overall dairy input costs are tracking mid-single-digit percentage increases for the year, on top of an already elevated 2021.
Passing it through without losing the room
Her solution has been unglamorous and, so far, effective: smaller, more frequent price adjustments instead of one large one, paired with more conversation at the counter about why. She keeps a running note of what's changed supplier-side — a cost increase on a specific wheel, a freight surcharge that showed up without warning — so that when a regular asks, she has an actual answer instead of a shrug.
"People don't mind paying more for something if they understand why," she said. "They mind feeling like the number just changed on them for no reason."
She's also leaned harder into the samples she can still afford to give away — small, deliberate tastes of something new rather than a full case tour — treating them as the thing that keeps a shrinking margin worth protecting. A customer who tries something and loves it is a customer who comes back even at the new price. One who never gets offered anything new has less reason to. It helps, she said, that cheese has stayed a comparatively affordable protein even as grocery bills overall have climbed, which gives her more room to make the case for trading up than a lot of other categories have right now.
It's a strange spring for grocery shelves generally — the same week national headlines were full of a formula shortage on the other side of the store — and she said the contrast hasn't been lost on her regulars, several of whom have commented on how full her case looks compared to other aisles. She's also watching her own labor line as closely as her cost of goods. Reduced staffing on the receiving and packaging side has meant occasional short-dated deliveries and the odd substitution she has to explain on the fly, a headache she says is newer and harder to plan around than the price increases themselves.
What she'd tell a newer counter
Her advice for members newer to retail: track your cost changes as they happen, not at month's end, and don't wait for a full quarter of increases to stack up before you say anything to customers. "The conversation is easier in small pieces," she told us. "Nobody wants to hear all of it at once, including me."
If you're a retail member working through the same math this season, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting notes like hers informally — worth a call if you want to compare what's working at other counters.
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.