Members building holiday inventory this month are running the numbers twice, and not because the demand side looks soft. Specialty cheese has had a strong year, and most of the members we've talked to expect a busy November and December case. The pressure this fall is coming from the input side. High-quality alfalfa has been trading near record levels, and several members with their own herds have told us their per-cow feed bill is the highest they can remember, well ahead of anything a typical fall price bump would explain.
That matters for a trade federation mostly because it changes the conversation members are having with their own buyers. A cheesemaker who priced a holiday wholesale contract in the spring, before this fall's feed numbers were in, may be sitting on a make cost that's climbed out from under that number. We've heard from more than one small creamery this month asking essentially the same question: is it too late to revisit a contract that was signed before the input side moved this much.
What's driving it, in plain terms
The short version is that a combination of tight hay supply and lingering drought conditions in several growing regions pushed feed prices up through the summer and they haven't come back down. At the same time, milk pricing has been mixed — cheese, butter, and milk powder components have supported farm milk prices for much of the year, but a pullback in powder prices through the third quarter has taken some of the edge off. Members who buy milk rather than produce it are seeing a market that's firm but not moving in one clean direction, which makes it harder to lock in a make-cost number with confidence.
Export demand has stayed a bright spot. Fresh cheese exports have been running well ahead of last year, and federal trade data suggests fourth-quarter demand should hold up. That's good news for members selling into wholesale channels with export exposure, less directly useful for a farmstead producer whose costs are set locally and whose holiday case is sold at the counter, not overseas.
What we're telling members
If you're one of the members finishing holiday production planning right now, this is a reasonable month to build a small cushion into your pricing rather than holding to a number you set six months ago. A wholesale buyer who's been paying attention to feed and energy headlines generally isn't surprised by a modest adjustment request this time of year; the ones who are surprised are usually the ones who didn't hear from you until the invoice showed up.
If your contracts don't have any language addressing input-cost movement, that's worth fixing before you sign next year's, not this year's. We don't offer contract templates — that's outside what the federation does — but the Membership & Outreach Committee has fielded enough of these questions this fall that they're planning a short session on the topic alongside the usual holiday-season programming. If your cave is carrying more wheels than usual into a market that's still finding its footing on cost, that's a conversation worth having with the committee sooner rather than in December.
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.