Two pieces of paperwork moved this month, and members exporting across the northern border and members selling into federal purchasing programs are going to feel them differently. Neither is dramatic on its own. Together they're a good reminder that "the market" isn't one thing right now — it's several markets, pulling in different directions, and your case might be sitting in more than one of them at once.
The first is a quota notice covering how cheese and other dairy products move into Canada under this year's trade rules. The allowance itself hasn't shrunk, but the way it's being administered has tightened in a way that several of our exporting members flagged to the Events Committee's trade contacts as harder to plan around than the number on the page suggests. If you ship north on a regular schedule, this is worth a conversation with your customs broker before your next order, not after a shipment gets held up.
The other side of the ledger
The federal food-box purchasing program that's been buying combination boxes of produce, dairy, and meat since spring opened its third contract round this month, with purchasing continuing through the end of October. The list of eligible cheeses is broader than round one — hard, semi-firm, and semi-soft styles are all in scope now, not just cheddar — which means members who make Gouda, Monterey, or a washed-curd style have a purchasing channel they may not have had over the summer. It's not a replacement for wholesale or retail demand that dried up this year, but for a member with volume to move and cold storage filling up, it's worth a look.
Underneath both of these sits a milk price that's been anything but steady. The federal dairy margin program's monthly figure jumped more than two dollars per hundredweight between June and July, and retail prices on whole and lowfat milk took their largest single-month jump in years in August. None of that is a forecast — margin numbers this volatile this year have a way of moving again before the ink dries — but it's the backdrop against which both of this month's federal moves are landing.
It's worth sitting with why an export-side tightening and a domestic-purchasing expansion landed in the same month, because it's not a coincidence so much as two different responses to the same underlying problem. Demand has been lumpy and hard to predict all year — restaurant and food-service buying fell off a cliff in the spring and has come back in fits and starts, while retail grocery demand has stayed unusually strong. Both of this month's federal moves are, in their own way, attempts to smooth that lumpiness: one by protecting a domestic market some producers depend on, the other by creating a purchasing channel to absorb supply that might otherwise have nowhere to go.
That's cold comfort if you're the exporter dealing with new paperwork friction and getting none of the food-box benefit, or the small producer who doesn't have the volume or certifications to bid into a federal purchasing contract. We hear both of those frustrations, and neither program was designed with a member our size specifically in mind. What we can do is make sure you're not finding out about either one secondhand, three weeks after it would have been useful to know.
The milk price swings we mentioned above aren't background noise, either — they're the reason both programs matter more this year than they would in a steadier one. When the margin between milk cost and cheese price moves two dollars a hundredweight in a single month, a producer's decision about whether to chase an export order, bid into a purchasing contract, or just hold inventory and wait can flip within a matter of weeks. We'd rather you make that call with current numbers in front of you than with whatever you last heard at a summer webinar.
What we'd do with this
If you export, call your broker about the new quota administration before you assume last month's paperwork will clear the same way this month. If you're weighing whether to bid into the food-box program for the first time, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting notes from members who went through the process in earlier rounds and can connect you before you commit. And if you're just trying to read the milk price the way everyone else is this year — cautiously, a week at a time — you're reading it right.
If any of this affects your business and you're not sure which committee to bring it to, start with Membership & Outreach — they'll route you to Events for trade questions or point you toward the right federal contact for purchasing-program questions, whichever this turns out to be.
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.