The wholesale market for Cheddar is typically a mild one. But the vagaries of supply and demand during the pandemic have caused sharp swings in cheese prices, which rose to record highs this month — just weeks after plummeting to nearly 20-year lows.
Consumers are buying way more cheese, even as the usually huge demand from restaurants and schools has fallen off. Dairy farmers and prepared-food companies, which supply ingredients to cheese makers or buy their products, have seen disruptions in their businesses. Together, these countervailing forces have fueled the up-and-down trading in the market.
Like the price of oil, silver and hogs, cheese prices are set, in part, by traders in commodities markets. Each trading day at 11 a.m. Chicago time, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange operates a 10-minute session in which buyers and sellers — typically large dairy food cooperatives, cheese producers or other companies active in the industry — electronically trade roughly 40,000-pound truckloads of young, mild Cheddar.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: New York Times
