Guest Columns

Perspective:
WCMA

Leading U.S. cheese producers

John Umhoefer

John Umhoefer is executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. He contributes this column monthly for Cheese Market News®.

Lists don’t matter. Quality matters. Profitability matters.

Company rankings and industry pecking orders are not a measure of business success.

But when Agropur announced the purchase of Davisco Foods International’s dairy business in July, your first thought was — where does that put Agropur on the list?

WCMA has efforted a list to rank producers of natural cheese in the United States. Such a list will have several caveats, beginning with the fact that this is a cheese production list, not a list measuring cheese purchased, marketed or sold. It refers to cheese production within the U.S. only. This list includes natural cheeses and excludes pasteurized process styles, cottage cheese and cream cheese.

The top five natural cheese producers in the United States, in order:
1. Leprino Foods

2. Saputo Cheese USA

3. Hilmar Cheese Co.

4. Glanbia Foods

5. Agropur

The recent acquisition of Davisco Foods places Agropur in fifth place for production of natural cheese within the United States. And there is clearly a top five in the United States, with breathing room before the next five is reached. Another note: Cheese production at Southwest Cheese in Clovis, N.M., is assigned to Glanbia Foods for this list. The massive cheese plant is a joint venture plant between Glanbia Foods, Dairy Farmers of America, Select Milk Producers and the Greater Southwest Agency.

This list was developed mainly via direct communication with organizations, review of corporate websites and corporate media statements and some educated consensus. For example, competitors of Leprino Foods in the top five simply conceded that the Denver-based giant makes more cheese.

This ranking is a snapshot. Companies throughout this top 20 list are in the process of bringing new plants on line, or adding capacity at existing plants or drawing up new capacity.

The next five, in order:

6. Foremost Farms USA

7. Lactalis American Group

8. Associated Milk Producers Inc.

9. Great Lakes Cheese

10. BelGioioso Cheese

The next 10 top natural cheese producers in the United States fall into two groups, clustered by production volume, and the organizations in these groups will not be ranked. The first group (alphabetical order) includes:
Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), Kraft Foods, Land O’Lakes Inc. and Tillamook Cheese.

Obviously this group includes powerful cheese marketers, but this list is simply ranking natural cheese production in the United States, not sales, not conversion, not distribution, not marketings.

As the list proceeds, differences in total cheese production narrow. Note that for this list, cheese production at Melrose Dairy Proteins in Melrose, Minn., is assigned to Land O’Lakes. Melrose is a joint venture between Land O’ Lakes and DFA. In direct communication, DFA offered the total production at their five wholly-owned natural cheese production plants.

The top 20 natural cheese producers in the United States is rounded out with these six organizations (alphabetical order):

Agri-Mark, Darigold, First District Association, Grande Cheese, Mullins Cheese and Valley Queen Cheese Factory.

Altogether, WCMA estimates that these 20 organizations produce more than 75 percent of the natural cheese crafted in the United States.

The cheese plants operated by these companies comprise about 15 percent of the total number of U.S. natural cheese plants (as listed by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service in 2013). In other words, about 15 percent of cheese plants in the U.S. produce an estimated 75+ percent of America’s cheese.

Nine of the organizations on this list are cooperatives, eight of the top 20 organizations are privately held, and three are publicly-held corporations.

Lists don’t matter. Lists change. But this is a snapshot of the U.S. natural cheese industry today.

CMN

The views expressed by CMN’s guest columnists are their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of Cheese Market News®.

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