Fine Cheese & Charcuterie May 2014

The Specialty Food Association has released the 2014 State of
the Industry Report prepared in conjunction with Mintel and SPINS, and it presents a very positive outlook for the specialty food business. I encourage you all to obtain a copy and take a moment to review the facts and figures summarizing the performance of the industry in a well- presented report.

The first fact that jumped off the page for me was that total dollar sales of cheese and cheese alternatives were the largest of any category of specialty food. Americans purchased a substantial $3.99 billion of cheese in 2013. To put that figure in perspective, that is almost twice as much cheese sold than frozen and refrigerated meats, poultry and seafood combined. I guess you importers/distributors/ retailers have collaborated effectively to push some serious product through the channel. Better yet, the business has grown 16.1 percent from 2011 to 2013. If you take a closer look, you will notice that the growth didn’t come from selling more units, since the unit growth is reported to have only increased 1.9 percent during the same period. So you are either cutting larger chunks off the wheel or the price per pound of the cheese being purchased has increased. This could be a sign that there has been substantial growth in the specialty cut-and-wrap end of the cheese business. Our esteemed colleague and resident cheese head James Mellgren started writing Fine Cheese & Charcuterie during this period too ... could there be a correlation?

As you can imagine, with the cheese and cured meat business becoming so large, there is a lot of news that James wants to keep you informed about throughout the year in the eight issues of Fine Cheese & Charcuterie that he writes. But some news can be timely, and we want to disseminate it through the channel as soon as possible. To facilitate the timely delivery of information, and keep you better informed, James will be writing a semimonthly email newsletter, titled Cheesebytes. Many of you will have noticed that you have already started to receive Cheesebytes along with our new issue notifications. If you haven’t seen Cheesebytes in your email box by the time you read this, this serves as your reminder to check your spam folder or come sign up for the newsletter.

I want to congratulate you all for a stellar run ... keep up the good work.

David Spencer
Publisher, Gourmet Business 

President, HousewaresDirect, Inc. 

dspencer@gourmetbusiness.com