If you've looked at a milk-price report this month and come away more confused than when you started, you're not alone. Class III, the price tied most closely to cheese milk, has been swinging by the week — down, then sharply back up — while Class IV has moved on a slower, calmer track. That gap between the two has widened enough that members on both the producer and processor sides have been asking us to explain it in plain terms.
Here's the short version. Cheese plants price off Class III. When that number jumps around this much, so does everything downstream of it: what a creamery pays for milk, what a wholesale block of cheddar costs a distributor, and what shows up on a wholesale price sheet with barely a week's notice. A few members have told us they're now quoting prices with an expiration date attached, something none of them did a year ago.
Federal weekly market reports through the middle of June described cheese plants running full schedules, most on six- or seven-day production weeks, with orders keeping the line busy even as the price they were paying for milk moved sharply from one week to the next. That's a strange combination — a plant that's both fully booked and unsure what its next invoice will look like — and it's exactly the position a handful of our mid-size processor members described to us this month.
Where the demand is actually coming from
Retail grocery has stayed strong all spring — people cooking and stocking at home hasn't slowed down. What's changed is the second channel: a federal food-box purchase program has been buying dairy product in bulk since mid-May, and it's been enough volume that a few of our members are supplying into it directly or through a distributor. Mistlebrook Dairy told us the program has been steady, predictable business in a season where almost nothing else has been. Continental Specialty Provisions, which moves product for several of our small and mid-size producer members, said the same thing: it's not glamorous, but it's an order they can count on from one week to the next.
Foodservice is the piece still misbehaving. Just as some regions were letting restaurants seat customers again, case counts ticked back up in parts of the country through late June, and a handful of local governments have paused or rolled back reopening steps. For a member whose cheese case depends on restaurant and food-service accounts, that's a second whiplash in three months — plan for the reopening, then plan for the pause.
What we're telling members
If you sell primarily wholesale or foodservice, treat your near-term pricing as provisional and say so to your buyers. If you're weighing whether to bid into a bulk purchase program, talk to your distributor about volume commitments before you commit capacity you might need elsewhere. And if your cash flow is stretched by the swings, our Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding questions all month and can point you to the relief-program guidance we've already published.
We don't expect Class III to settle down before harvest season, and we'd rather you hear that from us now than get surprised by an invoice in August.
None of this is abstract to the people actually standing over a vat. A tighter, more unpredictable milk supply changes make schedules — a creamery that would normally hold milk back for an aged wheel may instead push more of it into a faster-turning fresh cheese to get cash moving. If you've noticed your usual supplier's aged selection looking a little thin this summer, that's very likely why, and it's worth asking your rep directly rather than assuming it's a quality issue.
We'll keep publishing plain-language recaps like this one as long as the price swings keep members guessing. If there's a piece of this you'd like us to unpack further, the Membership & Outreach Committee is the right first stop, and they'll loop in the right committee from there.
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.