Two members called the office this week with the same chart and opposite worries. One had seen cheese-based Class III pricing come off its spring highs and wanted to know if it was time to hold back on a wholesale order. The other had seen the export numbers — dairy shipments abroad running well ahead of last year's pace — and wanted to know if it was time to expand. Both were reading the same market. Neither was wrong.
Milk production has been climbing all spring, up mid-single digits over last year by some counts, and more milk on the ground tends to soften the cheese-based pricing benchmarks that set the floor under a lot of wholesale contracts. That's the piece our first caller was feeling. At the same time, export demand for U.S. dairy has stayed strong enough to absorb a good share of that extra volume, which is the piece our second caller was watching. Both things are true at once, and that's most of why this spring's cheese case has felt harder to read than usual.
What this means for your pricing
If your contracts reference Class III as a benchmark, expect some softness through the summer unless production growth slows. That's not a reason to panic — it's a reason to know which of your customers are on index pricing and which are on a fixed sheet, and to have that conversation before your next delivery, not after. If you sell direct or through a distributor relationship without a formal index, you have more room to hold your price where it is; just be ready to explain why if a buyer brings you last month's mailbox price.
Export strength is the more interesting long-term signal for smaller producers, even if it doesn't show up on your invoice directly. A market that's absorbing extra domestic volume overseas is a market with less downward pressure on you next quarter. If you've been curious about export documentation and haven't had the bandwidth to look into it, this is a reasonable season to start — our Export Documentation Essentials course walks through what a first shipment actually requires, from health certificates to the paperwork your freight forwarder will ask for twice.
There's a smaller, more practical wrinkle underneath both numbers: butter and dry whey have actually posted stronger gains than cheese this spring, which is unusual enough to be worth noting if you make anything besides a straight table cheese. A creamery selling both fluid whey byproduct and finished wheels may find the byproduct side of the ledger looking healthier than the cheese side for a stretch, and that's worth factoring into how you price a whey-cream skim or a butter run this summer rather than treating it as a footnote to the cheese number.
Where to take this next
We don't publish a house price forecast — that's not our job, and anyone who tells a cheesemaker with confidence what next month's mailbox price will be is guessing along with everyone else. What we can do is keep flagging the two threads: production growth on one side, export demand on the other. Watch both, and if your contract language only mentions one of them, that's worth a second read before you sign the next one.
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.