As restaurants in NYC and Boston started closing their doors, specialty cheese shops and wholesales distributers that sold artisan local cheeses started simultaneously seeing 50% drops in sales overnight. I started calling cheesemakers around Vermont to learn how the situation was impacting them. My job took a turn, shifting from trying to support best practices for makers in Vermont to trying to ensure that as many makers as can are able to get through the COVID-19 impact without shuttering their businesses.
I try to call a few cheesemakers every day to see how they are doing, and we’re facing a range of challenges. Some are trying to reduce cheese production, so that production doesn’t exceed demand. This means reducing incoming milk quantities, which means diverting milk produced by dairy animals to another buyer (since those animals keep producing milk every day!) or, in some cases, selling animals off. Others are facing stock issues: Limited aging spaces – meaning that if they continue to make cheese and can’t sell it, eventually their aging spaces will fill, and their animals will still continue to make milk … and they will be back to the previously expressed need to reduce incoming milk.
Alongside the production challenges, there are other issues. The gooey, runny, high moisture texture that makes camembert-style cheeses a delight to enjoy also comes with a short shelf life. These cheeses often need to be eaten fairly quickly when they are ripe, or they will quickly deteriorate in quality beyond where one would want to eat or sell them. For those makers who focus on making these softer cheeses – they have inventory that is sitting in aging cellars without its usual consumer audience.
... So to summarize the situation, it’s like this: Imagine we had a three lane highway going into NYC with cheese instead of cars, then two lanes closed down. We have … a massive cheese traffic jam. We (Vermont Cheese) would normally sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese from our mid- and smaller-sized makers over the next four months…and currently we are selling around half (or perhaps less than that) compared to what we’d normally sell. On other words, we have a BIG cheese traffic jam – one that will grow to likely be hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese if people don’t buy it – or if makers don’t stop making it (and again - the milking animals will keep producing milk ...).
Online sales can only go so far. Some people won't order online, and certain produce and dairy products are not suited to UPS deliveries, especially when the temperature rises. Unless more distant producers can make the long round trip to the NYC and/or work out wider grocery distribution, they're going to suffer.