One of our longtime wholesale members has been part of the federation for longer than some of our staff have been in the workforce. She's a regional sales rep for a distributor supplying grocery and specialty accounts, and traditional cheddar has been her book of business for most of a career that now spans twenty-two holiday seasons. We caught her this week between deliveries, mostly because she was the only person we talked to who sounded relaxed.
"Every December somebody tells me cheddar's had its moment," she said. "I've been hearing that since I started." Her accounts still move a lot of it — clothbound, aged, sharp, the kind retailers put next to the gift baskets in November and don't restock until the shelves are bare. What's changed, she told us, isn't the cheese so much as who's buying it and how fast they want it.
The buyers have gotten more specific
Twenty years ago, she said, a wholesale account might order "cheddar" and leave the aging to her judgment. Now the calls come in asking for a specific number of months, a specific rind treatment, sometimes a specific region of origin. That tracks with what global dairy sector reporting has been saying this year about demand broadly: milk and dairy production keeps growing worldwide to meet new nutritional habits and preferences, and a lot of that growth is showing up as an appetite for full-flavored, full-fat product rather than the mildest option on the shelf. For her, that's meant carrying a wider spread of aging points than she used to, and more conversations with the creameries she represents about labeling those distinctions clearly on the case card.
None of that shows up as a line item on an order form, of course. It shows up as a buyer asking a more specific question than they used to, and expecting a specific answer back rather than "the usual." Her generation of sales reps, she joked, had to relearn the job around the same time the buyers did.
It's also meant faster turnaround. Retail buyers used to place a holiday order in September and let it ride through January. Now she gets adjustment calls into December as shelf sets shift and a competitor's promotion changes what a retailer thinks they need for the following week. "You used to plan the season. Now you plan the season and then you replan it twice," she said, without much complaint — mostly as a fact of the job at this point in her career.
What twenty-two years teaches you
Asked what she'd tell a newer member trying to build a wholesale book from scratch, she didn't hesitate: know your buyer's calendar better than they do. "If you call in October asking what they need for the holidays, you're already behind. I'm calling in July." It's not glamorous advice, but it's the kind that holds up across two decades of the same season showing up on schedule, tariff lines and trend cycles notwithstanding.
If you're new to wholesale sales and want a longer conversation than a blog post allows, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a list of members open to mentoring conversations with newer colleagues in the trade. It's a good way to close out the year — with a phone call to someone who has already seen twenty-two of them.
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.