Specialty cheese had a good year. Federal purchase activity for cheese and other dairy products has stayed steady this spring, and members have told us their own numbers mostly track that story — a case that's moving again after 2025 taught everyone to watch it closely. That's the good part of the news.
The part worth sitting with is what else is filling that same case. Federal purchase activity and rising import volumes have both been part of the dairy picture this spring, and a shopper standing in front of a well-stocked counter doesn't automatically know which wheel drove two hours from a farmstead and which one crossed an ocean or came out of a much larger plant. To that shopper, it's all just cheese, priced against cheese.
Crowded isn't the same as competitive
A bigger overall market sounds like room for everyone, and in the aggregate it probably is. But shelf space in an actual store is finite, and a buyer deciding what to reorder next month is comparing margin per square foot, not market-wide production figures. A domestic producer who can't explain, quickly, why their wheel belongs in that space over a larger or imported alternative is competing on price alone — a fight small operations rarely win against volume.
What's actually working for members this spring isn't a lower price. It's a sharper story: where the milk came from, who made the wheel, what makes this particular style worth the extra dollar. Trade coverage this year has pointed to the same thing from the demand side — shoppers are gravitating toward cheeses that feel discoverable, with a clear point of origin, rather than toward the cheapest option in the case. That's a demand shift a small producer can actually use, if the story is told well and told consistently, on the label, at the counter, and in any wholesale pitch.
Where to put the effort
If your case copy, your label, and your sell sheet all say roughly the same three sentences about your operation, that's a gap worth closing before summer traffic picks up. The federation's Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing course walks through building that narrative once and then adapting it across a label, a farmers market table card, and a wholesale one-pager, so you're not rewriting it from scratch every time a buyer asks a version of the same question.
It's also worth talking to your distributor rep about where your wheel actually sits relative to what else is moving through their warehouse right now. A rep who can tell you which three competitors occupy the shelf space nearest yours is more useful this quarter than one who can only tell you your own numbers — the comparison is the whole point.
The market is bigger this year. Whether that helps you depends less on the total size of the pie and more on whether the person standing at the case can tell, in about five seconds, why your wheel is the one to try. That's a smaller problem than "the market changed," and it's one you can actually work on this week, without waiting for the next production report to tell you how it turned out.
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.