Every week we read the cheese trade so you don’t have to — California, national, and international — and tell you what it actually means for your case, your margin, and your counter conversation.
4 California · 7 National · 9 International · Issue 1 covers August 5 – September 6, 2026
One from each tier, in full, so you can judge the work before you pay for it.
Vermont's Jasper Hill Farm expected to ship nearly $1 million of artisan cheese into Canada last year — 7 to 8 percent of its annual sales. Within a month of the February 2025 tariff announcements, that entire market dried up, and co-founder Mateo Kehler called 2025 “the worst year we've ever had.” The sting, he says, isn't just the duties — it's the boycott: “The backlash on the market side is actually what's affecting us the most. It's the rhetoric that has inspired a boycott.” A holiday-season rebound order died with the August tariff round; Canada answered September 8 with 25% on U.S. cheese and 50% on milk, cream, and whey. At home, cheesemaking equipment from Canada now carries tariffs up to 50% — one machine sits stranded across the border — while diesel is up over 80%.
The Sonoma stone-building creamery announced it has made the “incredibly difficult decision” to cease production, saying the business never fully recovered from the pandemic and that the financial demands of running a small artisanal company had become unsustainable. Vella is the house most closely associated with California Dry Monterey Jack — a hard, nutty, cocoa-rubbed grating cheese with a genuine claim to being one of the few original American styles rather than an import copy.
Federal investigators closed a Listeria monocytogenes outbreak traced to requesón and other soft, ricotta-style cheeses. Fifteen people were sickened and fourteen hospitalized across four states — Illinois, Maryland, New York and Virginia — with one death reported in Maryland. The most striking detail is duration: sample dates run from March 2023 to June 2026, meaning the outbreak ran more than three years before it was identified. The recall was expanded in mid-August to cover all Clover Hill Dairy brand cheese.
After a punishing summer drought damaged Alpine grazing land, French authorities agreed to temporarily loosen the protected-designation feed and grazing requirements governing three of the country’s most important mountain cheeses. PDO rules normally dictate exactly what the herd may eat and where it may graze — the mechanism that makes these cheeses taste of a specific place.
The member edition carries all 20 stories in this issue — awards and who won them, recalls and lot codes, closures, PDO rulings, weather that will change how a cheese tastes two years from now — each with our own operator takeaway and a link to the original reporting.
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