Last time I bought my 2 Cases of Grande WM Shredded Cheese the Cost was $120 a case.
Today I went to my NJ Distributor and thinking I might have to pay at least $130-$140 a case.
But the Price was $107 a case and a case of Sausage was still at $49 a case(Not Gone up}
I guess prices have dropped atads but don't tell the people that make pizza since they raise their prices
and not lowering them.....JT
Dairy industry in north america has been in a bad place for years now. Production keeps going up and consumption has been flat.
Small producers collapse under the weight of their debt and/or get bought out by large producers. There have been a few years when the total number of dairies in the US fell precipitously but the total US dairy herd size increased substantially. The trend predates both Biden and Trump and shows no sign of stopping.
From the perspective of the small producer, the cycle is typically that the prices of milk and butterfat drop enough that they can't quite service their existing debt.
Their bank says that they can't just restructure that debt, but they CAN acquire more debt and roll the old debt into it, use that to expand the business, and then maybe next year they can service the new, larger debt.
And that often doesn't really pan out because the price dropped again.
Aside from the growing popularity of nut, grain, and legume-based slurries, the issue is compounded by the realities of epigenetics.
In mammals, lactose intolerance during infancy in the animal kingdom is generally fatal. As humans, we can work around it a little but the details are legion and plenty of infants need specialty formula to survive, and this is what has made the current formula shortage really bad. What did those babies do without modern formula in the past? They died.
Anyway. If your ancestry includes people from any region that has historically raised livestock for milk (other than some cultures that only consumed fermented milk products), there are 5 separate genetic adaptations that can allow you to keep producing lactase enzymes into adulthood __IF__ milk is still on the menu after infancy. And you can have up to 3 of these adaptations at a time.
The reason that the default is to stop producing lactase enzymes is because the synthesis is slightly expensive if you don't need it.
Increasing poverty and increasing hippie bull%$# mean that fewer kids are drinking milk so they lose the ability to digest lactose and grow up lactose intolerant.
In Canada they instituted production quotas to keep prices high enough for the small producers to survive, but I guess that's communism because in the USA we're just going to let the small producers go bankrupt.
