A small retail data point crossed our desk in January, and it's worth more attention than a milk-aisle statistic usually gets: whole milk grew its retail volume again last year, and plant-based alternatives fell for a second consecutive year running, down to their lowest level since before the pandemic. Nobody's declaring a trend off one year of numbers, but it lines up with something a lot of our members in the specialty case have been telling us anecdotally for a while — shoppers who drifted toward alternatives a few years back are drifting back, and they're bringing a preference for "the real thing" with them into other categories too, cheese included.
Small producers are treating this as real, not a fluke
We don't usually put much stock in a single data point, but this one is consistent with what we're hearing from members directly. A handful of smaller creameries in our network spent part of this winter adding capacity rather than trimming it — new equipment, larger batch sizes, one member who told us she'd finally invested in a proper affinage room after three years of borrowing cave space from a neighbor. That's not the behavior of an industry bracing for a downturn. It's the behavior of one that expects the shopper who wants a real answer instead of a substitute to keep showing up.
None of this means every category is booming equally. A recovery in consumer preference for dairy generally doesn't automatically show up as a recovery in your specific wholesale account, and plenty of members are still fighting for shelf space against private-label competition that has nothing to do with whether shoppers prefer real cheese. But it's a genuinely different backdrop than the one a lot of us were planning around three years ago, when the safe assumption was that every category needed to defend itself against the alternative next to it on the shelf.
What we'd actually do with this
If you've been holding off on an investment — a piece of equipment, a new hire, a slightly larger batch size — because you weren't sure demand would hold, this is a reasonable month to revisit that math with fresher numbers rather than the assumptions you built two or three years ago. That doesn't mean every expansion pencils out; it means the demand side of the equation looks a little more forgiving than it has in a while, which changes what a reasonable bet looks like.
It's also worth remembering that a favorable retail trend doesn't do your storytelling for you. Members abroad have been leaning hard into provenance and small-batch narrative on their own labels this winter — not because the product changed, but because a shopper who's choosing real dairy over an alternative is often also the shopper most willing to pay attention to where a wheel actually came from. If your label or your counter card hasn't been updated in a while, this is a good season to make sure it's actually telling that story, not just naming an ingredient list.
We'll keep watching this one past a single winter's numbers before calling it anything more than encouraging. In the meantime, if you're weighing a specific expansion or capacity decision and want a second opinion, our Membership & Outreach Committee can connect you with a member who made a similar call recently and can tell you honestly whether it worked.
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.