Retail scanner data covering the year through early December told a story a lot of our members already suspected from their own case: American cheese kept losing ground while a handful of international and artisanal styles posted real growth. Paneer, burrata, and queso quesadilla were among the standout gainers, each up double digits in retail sales over the prior year, while the broader natural cheese category continued outpacing processed cheese overall.
None of this is a single dramatic headline — it's a slow bleed on one side of the case and a slow build on the other. But slow trends are exactly the kind that reward a producer who notices early and punish one who doesn't notice until a distributor mentions it in passing.
Why these particular styles
The styles gaining ground share a couple of things in common: they photograph well, they carry a clear point of origin or technique a shopper can talk about, and they work in more than one meal occasion rather than sitting only on a cheese board. Burrata moves as an appetizer and a salad topper. Paneer moves as a main-dish ingredient, not just a snack. That versatility matters more to a retail buyer than pure flavor quality, because it's what determines how often a shopper reaches for it in an ordinary week rather than a special-occasion one.
For small producers, the useful question isn't whether to chase any one of these specific styles — most of you aren't set up to pivot into paneer production overnight, and that's fine. The useful question is whether your own case or your own production line has an equivalent: something with a clear story, a clear use beyond the cheese board, and enough versatility that a customer reaches for it on a Tuesday, not just a holiday. A young alpine style with a good melting profile can do the same job for your case that burrata is doing for the retail data broadly, if it's positioned that way.
Coverage of new product development this winter has also pointed toward bolder, less conventional flavor and format experimentation — unusual colorants, layered flavor profiles, formats built for snacking rather than slicing. That's a bigger swing than most of our small-production members need to make, and we're not suggesting anyone chase novelty for its own sake. But it's a useful signal about where shopper curiosity is currently pointed, and a producer deciding between two new SKUs for spring might reasonably let that curiosity tip the choice toward the more distinctive option rather than the safer one.
What to do with this before spring planning
If you're setting your production and case plan for the next quarter, this is worth a look at your own numbers rather than taking the national trend at face value: which of your styles moved fastest last year, and does that lineup match the versatility pattern above, or does it look more like the styles that are losing shelf space nationally? A producer or buyer who runs that comparison now has a real head start on spring planning, well before the busier months make time for it harder to find.
If you want to talk through what this means for your specific case or product mix, the Membership & Outreach Committee can connect you with members who've already walked through a similar repositioning.
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.