Tune in: the Wholesale Negotiation webinar

This Thursday, June 27, the federation is running its Wholesale Negotiation webinar — free, virtual, and open to any member with a case, a counter, or a loading dock. If you buy wholesale, sell wholesale, or both, put it on your calendar.

We scheduled this one for a reason. Trade coverage through early June has cheese and milk prices moving in a firmer direction than they were over the winter, and that shift changes the conversation at the negotiating table whether you're the one buying or the one selling. A supplier who was flexible on terms in January may not be flexible in July, and a buyer who locked in a price six months ago may be looking at a very different market today. Neither side benefits from walking into a renewal conversation assuming last year's numbers still apply.

What the session actually covers

The webinar isn't a pep talk about "knowing your worth." It's structured around three concrete pieces:

• Reading a supplier's position. What a tightening milk supply typically does to a producer's willingness to negotiate on volume discounts, minimum orders, and delivery windows.
• Structuring multi-month agreements. How to build price-adjustment language into a contract up front instead of renegotiating from scratch every quarter.
• Knowing when to walk. A short framework for recognizing a deal that costs you more in flexibility than it saves you in price.

None of this requires you to share your own numbers out loud. Breakout discussion is optional, and several members who've attended past sessions tell us they got the most value just from the Q&A at the end, where the instructor works through scenarios the audience submits live.

Cross-border pricing pressure has also been part of the trade conversation this spring, with distributors on both sides of a few contested tariff lines describing renegotiated terms as the new normal rather than a one-time adjustment. You don't need to import or export anything to feel the ripple effects — a distributor absorbing new costs upstream tends to pass some of that through to every account on their list, imported product or not. That's exactly the kind of shift the webinar is built to help you read and respond to, rather than just absorb.

Who this is for

If your last supplier conversation left you unsure whether you got a fair deal, this is for you. If you've been on the other side of the table — a distributor or producer setting terms with retail accounts — the same negotiating principles apply, just with the leverage flipped. We've had members from both ends of the supply chain in the room in past sessions, and the mix tends to make the discussion sharper, not more contentious.

Registration is open now through Wednesday evening. It's virtual, it's free, and if Thursday afternoon doesn't work, the recording goes out to everyone who registered, whether you make the live session or not.

One more thing worth flagging while trade conditions are unsettled: if you have contracts up for renewal in the next two quarters, this is a good week to at least skim your current terms before the webinar, so the material lands against something specific rather than in the abstract.

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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.