If your sales this year feel out of step with the gloomier headlines about the dairy sector, you may be reading the wrong part of the case. Recent retail data puts deli specialty cheese sales up roughly 8 percent in both dollars and volume this year, at a time when standard American cheese continues a slow multi-year slide. That's not a small divergence, and for members who sell anything outside the commodity block-and-barrel world, it's worth understanding which varieties are actually carrying that growth before you assume it applies evenly to your case.
The two categories doing most of the work aren't the ones a lot of small-batch American makers picture when they hear "specialty cheese is booming." Hispanic-style melting and topping cheeses — queso fresco, chihuahua, cotija — and a cluster of Italian styles including parmesan, mozzarella, romano, and burrata are leading the growth, some of them posting double-digit volume gains this year. Artisanal goat cheese is also holding up well even as some other artisanal styles, brie and blue among them, have cooled this year. If your case is built around washed-rind alpine styles or aged cheddar, this growth is happening near you, not necessarily to you.
Why this matters even if you don't make those styles
A rising specialty category tends to expand the shelf space and counter attention available to specialty cheese generally, even for makers whose own product sits outside the fastest-growing styles. Retail buyers building out a specialty section that's proving itself profitable are more likely to keep investing in that section's square footage, refrigeration, and staffing — space that benefits every specialty producer competing for it, not just the varieties currently pulling the growth numbers. A buyer who's watching queso fresco and burrata perform well is a buyer more willing to take a chance on your washed-rind wheel in the same case, because the category as a whole is proving it can move. Restaurant-at-home eating habits get a lot of the credit here too: shoppers who used to spend that money on takeout are now spending some of it on a better cheese case, and that spending doesn't stay confined to one style once it starts.
There's also a practical opening here for members willing to expand their lineup. If you make goat's-milk cheese already, or have the herd and equipment to start, this is a genuinely good year to lean into it rather than treat it as a side project. And if you're a retailer or distributor member reading your own case data and seeing the same pattern nationally, it may be worth a conversation with your Hispanic and Italian-style suppliers about volume commitments before the shelf space gets claimed by someone else's contract.
We're not telling members to abandon a style that's built their reputation to chase a growth category — that's a recipe for a case that satisfies no one, including your regulars. What we are saying is that "the cheese market is soft" and "specialty cheese demand is strong" are both true simultaneously this year, and they're describing different parts of the same case. Knowing which one applies to your specific product matters more than knowing the headline number, and it's worth checking before you plan next season's production around either story alone.
If you're a maker interested in the goat and sheep milk side of this trend, our course on that production path covers the fundamentals for members considering a lineup addition. If you're a retail or distributor member trying to make sense of category-level shelf data for your own planning, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to the fuller retail trend summary members have been circulating this summer.
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.