A group of major oil-producing countries announced an unexpected production cut this week, and while that headline lives mostly in the energy pages, it lands somewhere quieter for our members: the propane tank behind the creamery, the compressor keeping a cave at fifty-two degrees, the diesel in the truck that gets wheels to a distributor. None of that shows up on a cheese label, but all of it shows up on a March or April invoice.
We've heard from more than one member this spring that the arithmetic on a cave build-out or a second refrigeration unit has gotten harder to pencil since 2022's energy spike, even as the numbers on the other side of the ledger look better than they have in years. Class III milk pricing — the class that prices most cheese milk — has been trending lower after 2022's highs, and forecasters have been calling for further softening this year. Cheaper milk should, in theory, ease pressure on a cheesemaker's cost sheet. Energy is the variable pulling the other way.
Growth and overhead, at the same time
The broader trend for specialty and artisan cheese has stayed genuinely good: demand keeps climbing, the case keeps getting more crowded with small producers, and buyers keep telling us they want more provenance-driven product, not less. "We're selling more than we ever have," one member told us this week, a farmstead producer running a single cave and a two-person cheesemaking team. "The part nobody warned me about is that growth means more refrigeration, more trucking, more everything — and all of that got more expensive at the same time our milk price finally cooperated."
That's the tension worth naming plainly: a good year for demand is not automatically a good year for margin, if the input side of the business is moving against you. Energy costs are a real line item, not a footnote, and they deserve the same planning attention as milk price and labor.
It's also easy to miss because energy costs move on a completely different calendar than milk pricing. Your milk contract might reset monthly against a published Class III number, but your propane supplier is quoting you a rate based on a global oil market that just moved on a weekend announcement nobody in the cheese business had any hand in. Watching both calendars at once, instead of just the one your milk check comes on, is part of what separates a cost sheet that holds up from one that quietly drifts.
What to actually do with this
If you haven't looked at your energy spend as its own line in a while, spring is a reasonable time to do it — before summer cooling costs stack on top of whatever a cold winter already cost you. A few members have told us that locking in a fixed-rate propane or electricity contract earlier in the year, rather than riding the spot market, has made their cost planning noticeably calmer, even when the fixed rate wasn't the cheapest number available in the moment.
Our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through building a full cost sheet that treats energy, not just milk and labor, as a real variable — useful whether you're setting wholesale prices for the first time or just tired of being surprised by your own utility bill. If energy costs are squeezing your numbers this spring, that's a good place to start.
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.