Most of us spent this week closing out orders, not reading spreadsheets. But the year's trade data is worth ten minutes before you sign off for the holidays, because it answers a question a lot of members have been asking us since October: was 2019 actually a good export year, or did it just feel that way at the conference in the spring?
The answer, on the published federal trade figures, is genuinely good. Export value tracked through the fall came in at a five-year high, with cheese volume doing most of the heavy lifting even as a few individual months slipped year-over-year. By the time the fuller year-end figures come out early next year, industry trackers expect cheese to post one of its best totals on record — a third straight year of growth after a long stretch of flat or declining volume earlier in the decade.
Why this matters for your 2020 plan
A few members have told us they're hesitant to expand capacity into export markets that "might not still be open" by spring. That's a reasonable worry given how much tariff language moved in 2019 — but it's also worth separating tariff-line noise from underlying demand. The data suggests demand for U.S. cheese abroad kept climbing even in a year with real trade friction, with several export regions posting near-record purchases along the way. If you're weighing a capital purchase for expanded production, that's the kind of signal that should carry real weight against the headline uncertainty.
The flip side: members whose export exposure runs through whey or milk powder rather than finished cheese had a rougher year than the cheese numbers suggest, and we wouldn't read the cheese recovery as a sign those lanes are back on their own. Tariff retaliation and an animal-disease outbreak overseas cut into demand for those categories specifically, and members in that position have told us they're diversifying buyers rather than betting the year on any single market reopening.
What we're watching into January
The federation doesn't have a crystal ball on tariff schedules, and neither does anyone else — we'd treat any confident prediction about February with real skepticism. What we can do is keep flagging the published trade data as it lands and pass along what members in export-facing roles are seeing on the ground. If you sell internationally and want to compare notes with other members before your January planning meeting, reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee, which keeps an informal list of members open to comparing notes across export categories.
It's also worth remembering that trade figures are backward-looking by definition. A strong 2019 doesn't guarantee a strong first quarter, and members who lock in export contracts early in the year have told us they're building a little more flexibility into 2020 terms than they did a year ago, just in case a tariff line moves again before the ink dries.
However 2020 opens, the clearest takeaway from this year's numbers is that flavor and quality carried more weight abroad than a lot of us expected going into January. That's a good note to end the year on, trade friction notwithstanding.
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.