Tight stocks, a firm block market, and a reopened export lane

Two numbers are worth putting side by side this week. Block cheese has been trading close to its highest level in several years, and national cheese stocks are running tens of millions of pounds below where they sat this time last year. Put together, that's a tighter market than most of our wholesale members have seen in a while, and it's worth understanding why before you plan your fall pricing.

Why the blocks are firm

Milk supplies feeding cheese plants have been steady this summer, and mozzarella and provolone lines in particular have been running hard, which is normally the kind of production pace that builds inventory rather than draws it down. Instead, stocks have shrunk, which points to demand — both from food-service mozzarella orders and from export buyers — outrunning even a healthy production pace. Some members selling into food-service channels have told us orders have actually softened a touch recently, which makes the tight stock picture even more of a signal that the export side is doing real work right now.

That's the piece we want members watching closely. A market this tight can turn on a relatively small shift in either direction. A slowdown in exports could rebuild stocks and soften prices faster than plants adjust for, and continued export strength could push the block market higher still into fall. Either way, this isn't the summer to lock in a long fall contract without checking the latest numbers first, and it's worth a call to your buyer rather than assuming last quarter's terms still make sense.

The export lane that just got easier

On the trade side, a retaliatory tariff dispute that had been weighing on exports to one of our largest southern markets was resolved earlier this year, clearing a lane that had been partly closed to member exporters since the middle of last year. Early trade data suggests cheese exports into that market are on track for meaningful growth this year, which lines up with what several of our exporting members have told us directly: orders that had gone quiet reopened faster than they expected once the tariff overhang cleared.

If your business exports and you haven't revisited your pricing or your buyer conversations since that dispute resolved, this is a good week to do it. A reopened lane after a year of uncertainty is exactly the kind of moment where a buyer relationship that went cold can be worth reviving with a phone call rather than waiting for them to come back to you. It's also worth checking whether your own documentation and certificates of origin are current, since a paperwork gap is the most common reason we hear about for a reopened order stalling before it ships.

We'll keep an eye on both threads — domestic stock levels and the export recovery — and flag anything that changes the picture materially. In the meantime, if you're an exporting member and want to compare notes with others navigating the same market, the trade panel format from this year's annual conference worked well enough that the Education Committee is considering a members-only version of it as a standing webinar. Let us know if that's something you'd use.

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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.