In this episode of Chart Chatter, Kathleen Wolfley and special guest Mark Majoros unpack a busy week in global dairy markets. Tune is as Kathleen covers the latest GDT results and Mark deep dives into what’s happening in the US high protein whey market. The duo also dives into shifting U.S. consumer spending—where high-income shoppers keep fueling demand for premium protein while value buyers pull back.
Interested in learning more about the high protein market? Check out Mark’s latest Ingredient Digest report.
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Future trading involves risk and is not suitable for all investors. Content provided in this segment is meant for educational purposes and is not a solicitation to buy or sell commodities.
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Welcome to Chart Chatter. Spend ten minutes. The two Ever.Ag colleagues into wildly different time zones to nerd out on global dairy market charts? Except for this week, we’ll go over eggs. Data Wizard is off on holiday. I’m Kathleen, market intelligence director with Ever AG Insights in the US.
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And I’m Marc Majoros, also director of Dairy Market Intelligence here in the US.
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And together we are the sometimes hosts of chart chatter. Marc, it’s 430 in Buffalo, New York on October 8th. It’s also October 8th in bend, Oregon. How is the mountain air?
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It is crisp. We’ve got nice fall temps here. The leaves are changing. The aspens are, looking beautiful out here, so. Yeah, we’re loving the fall temperatures here in central Oregon.
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That’s amazing. It is finally starting to get pretty crispy here in that crispy crisp here in western New York as well. It’s like 60 degrees. It’s delightful. All right let’s get to our agenda for this week. We’ve got a lot to cover. GTI event 389. We’ve got falling global cheese prices reduce US protein stocks, elevated high protein prices.
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And our special charity of the week GTI event 389 was a bit of a doozy. We saw the index fall 1.6% declines at whole powder declines in butter as well. Overall, our sense was that the decline was basically we had more supply and demand relative to supply was not all that great. Let’s highlight home operator specifically, homo powder prices down 2.3%.
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But at the same time, we did see stronger China activity. Overall, China activity was about 56% a volume. That was the strongest engagement going back to December of 2024. Shifting to Eskimo powder, the schema powder overall contracts were a bit mixed, values were slightly lower overall, but we saw most of those losses in the nearby contracts with gains in the farther out contracts.
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The fat complex, meanwhile, was mixed, with AMF moving a bit higher, butter a bit lower. Butter overall was down 2.6% from the prior auction.
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So, Kathleen, you mentioned China being pretty active here at this last event. And of course, that’s been a big question across the global dairy complex as well. You know, when is China going to be back? And should we take anything more from this that, you know, China was more active and are they back. What what does this mean.
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I think that just generally as I look at the GT data, China kind of is in and out and in and out. My feeling on China is that they’re still in a weak position. Milk supplies are falling, but so are milk prices. Or at least milk prices are staying pretty weak relative to history. I think generally they’re going to continue to import some volume, but their domestic consumption is not strong enough that it can support big imports as well as the strength in and overall production that they’ve seen here in recent years.
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Built still a long road ahead. Most likely, it seems.
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For sure, for sure. All right, Mark, I’m going to hold the floor if that’s okay. We’re not talking about cheese prices because to me, someone sitting in the US yesterday’s G80 mozzarella value was one of the more interesting things that came out of the event. Getty EU mozzarella prices dropped to $1.54 a pound. That was a 12% drop from the prior auction.
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I get it. There’s not a lot of maths the trades on GDP, so it’s not really the end all be all of EU mozzarella price indices or cheese indices at all. But I think it was notable because we have continued to see a stark decline in GDP mozzarella prices as well as mozzarella prices in Europe as well. As we look at the mozzarella price for instance, that fell another 2% this week to $1.64 per pound.
00;04;01;21 – 00;04;31;17
So we have seen sharp declines in European values really in just the last month, maybe six weeks. If you just look look at this chart here. Going back to early early to mid August, EU mozzarella prices, both on GDP as well as on the eggs were still in the 210 to 15 range. So we really have shaved a significant amount of value off of those maths values as supply continues to increase in Europe.
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And importantly, I think those exporters are starting to try to chase some export opportunities across the rest of the world. Clearly, the US has grown share buco, and I’ve talked about that for the last several iterations of chart chatter here in the last few weeks. So I think that we are in a position now where Europe is, is trying to go gain those export opportunities.
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It’s finding competition, or it has been finding competition versus the US. But hey, guess what? Here in the last week year, US prices have firmed a little bit. And now U.S. block prices are sitting about a dime above the ex mozzarella price and about $0.20 above the EU mozzarella price. So it’s a competitive landscape. And we’re going to see who can win that sale into those contested markets.
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Mark, one of the great things about having you as a colleague is that you are super engaged on the protein space. You’re kind of our resident expert on all things high protein. So talk to us about what you’re seeing in the market, that marketplace.
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That’s right. Yeah. Well thanks for those kind words Kathleen. Try to be tight in aware of things here. And yeah, it’s been an exciting market to follow here for sure. I think one of the primary features that we see today is there’s just not a lot of this stuff out there, right. Demand is fantastic for high protein whey.
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And that’s really limiting the stocks and availability across the complex. Dry whey stocks are very tight. The light the lowest they’ve been since 2012 here in July. And that’s not because demand is so fantastic. And it’s just, you know, going gangbusters because we’re not making any. Right. We’re making very little amount of dry away, actually the least amount going back probably more than 15 years.
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And we’re instead putting those solids into the highest value use into things like 80 and isolate. So that’s really limiting the stocks of products like dry way and WPC 34. When we look at 80 stocks.
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Slightly higher than.
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Last year, but still 19% below the five year average. So still historically light and WPI is down 4% from last year. But compared to 2023, they’re down 29%. So stocks remain very tight. Demand is red hot for these high protein products, whether that’s sports nutrition or any of the other long list of, you know, grocery items that you’ll see in the grocery store are making a a protein claim, right?
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Whether that’s pancakes, waffles, coffee, donuts, actually, you know, depending on where you’re at. So yeah, we just see this stuff everywhere. Demand is fantastic. Stocks are extremely tight. And which leaves this category I think very well supported from a price perspective.
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All right Mark you talk to us about price. What do you see in there.
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Well I mean right now spot prices 80 probably over $5.50, maybe 550 for regular 575, for instance. And when we look at API, very high prices, they’re 1050 on a spot basis. I think we can push higher there. I think one thing is that the functional proteins, functional isolates becoming more and more popular, acidified clear WPI, really driving strong premiums into the space.
00;07;43;07 – 00;07;56;02
Those prices are ranging anywhere from 11 to $13 a pound. So extremely high demand for these functional, very premium types of products. And again, keeping this complex extremely tight.
00;07;56;04 – 00;08;08;21
Mark, one thing that I find really interesting about this chart is price is higher. Stocks are lower. The stocks at least the stocks to use side of things are lower. Talk to me about what you’re seeing in terms of trends there.
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The stock’s use and price relationship has definitely improved here recently. I mean if you look over the long run that correlations are at a .33. But if you look at 23 forward it’s 0.81 much stronger I think that this slide here this chart shows okay. Unless we again expect supplies to grow significantly right. Or demand to fall off significantly that these prices are going to stay elevated.
00;08;34;11 – 00;09;03;14
And I don’t see the case for either of those things. Demand looks like it can remain really strong. We’ve got a consumer that’s, you know, been able to pay for this protein and been looking for and seeking it out. And the supply that we have, the capacity that we’ve added has been gobbled up really quickly. Right. So I don’t see a meaningful add in addition to supply, and I don’t see a meaningful decline to demand, which means the stocks to use ratio is likely to stay low, which means these prices are likely to stay elevated.
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So I had the opportunity this week, Mark, to go to Starbucks and grab one of their new high protein drinks with high protein cold foam. I also had the opportunity to try some protein pastries because, you know, when you’re in the dairy space, you gotta try the hot commodity, right? How do you think that consumers ultimately will react to having high protein everywhere at a high cost, too?
00;09;33;29 – 00;09;58;07
They certainly do have a long list of options. It’s just so front of mind for so many different consumers out there, whether, you know, a healthy aging type of elderly consumer or, you know, a Gen Z female gym going consumer, right? It just really spans a lot of these, demographics. And it seems like there are products for kind of each one of those.
00;09;58;09 – 00;10;18;07
And it seems that they’re willing to pay for them. Right? I mean, these prices are when you look at the comparison, a high protein oatmeal is twice the cost of a conventional one. You know, we continue to hear demand increasing for these types of items. So we haven’t yet found a price point really to where consumers are looking for other options.
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Protein is still extremely desirable even at this elevated price point.
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Mark, I think that your commentary on consumer spending really ties in well to our chart of the week, which is US household monthly spending. And it’s a really interesting dynamic that you and I and other colleagues within the insights team have been talking about quite a bit. You have this almost bifurcated consumer, and that you have folks that are willing to spend on high protein products on really expensive ground beef, but then you have others that are pulling back, trying to trim expenses where they can tighten their belts.
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And we clearly see this in the first half. 2025 household monthly spending versus the three year average, those households earning $100,000 or more increase of 8% of spending versus the three year average. Those earning less than $50,000 a year have seen a 5% reduction in monthly spending versus the five year average, so as we think about what does the future of protein look like?
00;11;18;14 – 00;11;50;09
What is the future of beef sales look like? What about butter and cheese? How are people spending? It’s really the the high income consumers that have continued to drive this economy continue to drive growth in some of those categories versus cheese, butter potentially being quite reliant on value opportunities, promotional activity to try to get product to move out of the retail store or to get traffic into a foodservice operation.
00;11;50;09 – 00;12;14;04
Certainly we’re seeing with that, with McDonald’s, with some of their extra value meals, we expect to see some pretty aggressive promotions on butter here in the holiday season. Given the decline in butter prices and that opportunity that’s presented itself. So as we go into 2026, I think that this chart is really a great look at, hey, how might we see that consumer transition, their purchases?
00;12;14;04 – 00;12;28;19
Where might we see growth in demand? Where might we see continue to pull back. And it sure seems like, at least on the protein side, that so long as that high income consumer has money in their pocket to spend, that, they’re going to spend it on protein.
00;12;28;19 – 00;12;54;04
Yeah, I fully agree with all of that. I mean, I think this chart really well encapsulates just this dynamic that we have the haves and have nots, right? The people with money are spending more of it. The people with a little less money are spending less of it. That’s bullish for value added high protein products. Right. All the NPCs case in 880 that we’ve been talking about, I think it’s bearish for things like dry way and skim and nonfat.
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Right. Like the commodity, you know, powders that you know, especially with the context of, you know, the prospect of additional snap cuts, rolling out here over the next few months. Right. And how we’ll see how that impacts consumers. But it doesn’t feel like it’s going to help, you know, the lower income consumer. And so it just feels like, you know, this tells a really good story of this split reality for, consumers here in the US.
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Exactly. Well, that’s it for shadow this week. A huge thanks to Mark for joining me and sharing what he knows about the protein markets, and to Nana and the ever ag marketing team for mixing mastering. If you’d like to learn more about how the insights team can support your business or if you have chart request, please contact us at Insights@Ever.Ag.
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