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What is everyone doing with rising cost of cheese?

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babyjake

New member
Just curious what owners are doing with rising cost of cheese. We recently raised our prices on everything. I was paying over $3 for a lb. of cheese. Our distributor won’t seem to work with me regarding prices.

Thank You
Smith
 
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Are you using a super premium cheese? While the market has reached all time highs by a lot, $3/LB should only be seen with the most expensive brands. Our Roma warehouse has more than a few options under $3/LB for any of their customers.
 
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All of us are losing profits, thanks to all time high prices for cheese. I think the question is how much are we willing to lose before we do something about it? Raising prices on everything can be done without customers complaining too much. I did this recently with all of our take n bakes. I used Wal Marts pricing (7.61, 9.43) odd numbers. Not one person complained at the 10%-20% increase.

It does not look like the cheese price is going to come down much. I think we are stuck with these cheese prices for a long long time. Every restaurant I go to has raised prices on their food recently.
 
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I raised my prices back in Feb and readjusted my menu for $3 cheese. Put up signs and did box toppers for 3 to 4 weeks explaining the price increase. Most of my customers did not complain, the few who did we just politely explained why and they all understood.
 
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We just raised some menu prices last month and are planning to increase the price of our package deals after the student leave in May. I’m going to raise the remaining prices later this year.

Your business is an investment, and like any investment you want to stay ahead of inflation. The best way to do that is by raising prices at least once a year, even when you don’t feel you need to. It’s much easier to make a small increase annually than suffer through a huge one every 5 years when your bottom line is really hurting!
 
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I’m doing our price increases in 3 waves of around 6% each by 2016. The first one will come this June, the second around April of next year and then the third at the beginning of 2016. We have an onslaught of expense increases happening over this time. In addition to cheese and other food cost increases we have wage increases of 25% ( $15000.00 a month) and then Obama care on top of that ( $5000 to $10000 a month). According to the math the 20% increase will cover it but you never know. If we cant maintain or increase sales with price increases then its a whole new ball game. Lucky for us sales have been strong so we are still profitable with the recent cheese prices. Its just hard to look at that food cost % at the end of each week. We are topping 40% food cost now.

David
 
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Sorry, Gilbert. You are getting raked over. Do you have more than one supplier? If not, call another and start price shopping.
 
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Cheese prices took a dip 2 weeks ago and I thought we had finally reached the spring peak, but they started shooting up again this past week. I’m sure the only one’s who will benefit from that dip is our suppliers. Perhaps we need to pressure congress to limit what we export in meat and dairy to China…
 
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I just received this from my FSA food rep today…​

It doesn’t look like we will see a lot of relief in cheese pricing anytime soon.

“Total cheese inventories are -9.3 million pounds lower than their five-year average.”

Exports seem to be the biggest issue, great for the producers… bad for domestic consumers.

(Don’t get me started on exporting subsidized dairy)

“According to USDA, 68.9 million lbs. of cheese was exported in February, aided in part by the
Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) export assistance program. This was up 44.2% from last year
and represents 8.1% of monthly total cheese production.”

http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/dywacheese_cmebl.pdf

Yeah, its for cheddar, not mozzarella, but I think it’s indicative of the overall market.
 
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