As consumer demands evolve and younger artisans learn the trade, mongering gets a fresh face.
You’ve likely heard that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services revealed the newest iteration of dietary guidelines for Americans, which harkens to the 1990s food pyramid, except turned upside down. The baseline staples of a healthy diet are depicted as steak, cheese, chicken, broccoli, peas, and carrots. Roughly half of the researchers behind the new guidelines are associated with meat and dairy trade associations, and accusations of bias were immediate. When combined with another one of the key changes — upping daily protein intake between 50 to 100 percent year over year — it’s a curious time to talk cheese.
It’s undeniable that Americans are crazy for protein. In 2025 about 60 percent of adults reported increasing their protein intake while the U.S. imported a record-breaking amount of beef from Brazil. In comes protein-rich cheese, which also hit a record domestic manufacturing high in 2025 with a mind-boggling 14.66 billion pounds produced. Cheese runs a spectrum from commodity-style, mass-produced varieties to small-batch artisanal creations. Lindsey O’Brien, assistant coordinator for the Master Cheesemaker Program at the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) in Madison, said that historically, mass-produced cheese is made on paper-thin margins.
“If you’re making two cents on a pound, you’re doing really well,” she said.
Due to these economic constraints, cheesemakers either go very big into commodity production, or stay small in the artisanal market where margins are higher. That’s where the opportunities abound.
According to Whole Foods’ trendspotters, the public is hungry for fancier, diverse cheeses, and specialties are growing in popularity. Small-scale dairy operations are calling to younger people today, and with it, a renaissance is afoot where cheesemakers and mongers alike are bringing more professionalization, education, and American representation to the global table.
Study Up
Artisanal cheese production starts with a dairy farmer, who supplies cow, goat, or sheeps’ milk. From there, the farmer supplies milk to a cheesemaker, and a cheesemaker funnels out product (eventually) to an affineur, who ages it. The final wedge goes to a cheesemonger, or salesperson: Think specialty cheese shops, or the fancy case at the grocery store.
Historically, cheese production was largely centered within family lineages, and workers were born into the industry. O’Brien’s team at CDR administers a survey to new cheese students annually to gauge their history in dairy; the past few years have shown that more students are entering the sector with no background in it at all. The interest in formalized cheese education is widening, with curious consumers even entering the fold.
Tracey Colley, director of the Academy of Cheese (AOC) in Norfolk, England, has observed a similar phenomena. In online coursework alone, 7,000 students are currently enrolled from 96 countries. The educational framework is intense. The first level of the program requires studying and identifying 25 cheeses from around the world. The second expands to another 75 cheeses, and the third adds 200 more. The coursework and certification programming is connecting with all kinds of people for numerous reasons, from the personal to the societal.
“Cheese is all about culture and history, and every country has a cheese that is theirs that they’ve been making since ancient times,” Colley said. “People want to be in touch with their product and their mind, and not be sitting on technology, but making something … It’s getting back to basics.”
Sharon Ruwart, an American fellow at the Academy of Cheese, concurs. “There’s an element of professionalization now where people are taking it seriously, and young people are guided into it as a career,” she said. In fact, one element of the cheese ecosystem has exploded in popularity for Gen Z: mongering.
Enter the Monger
Over the winter, the global cheese world raised their eyebrows and slow-clapped for Hannah Lee, a 28-year-old from Wisconsin who won the Young Cheese Monger of the Year at the World Cheese Awards. That was remarkable, Ruwart said, because the winner is usually European. Lee’s victory underscored how even if some gravitate to cheese for its hands-on, experiential nature, social media is positively transforming the profession, and ushering more young people in.
For example, TikTok videos of mongers cracking open Parmesan wheels to show a day in the life contrasts greatly with the growing unease in the value of higher education, and a tumultuous job market for new graduates.
People can touch cheese. It has a hard value, and its very tangibility is appealing.
In the European cheese world, Colley said that there’s always a bit of job churn. There are a lot of cheese workers, but many exit the industry because navigating regulations and the import/export market is challenging. While that preserves cultural heritage, the trade-off, Colley said, is that there is less experimentation in cheesemaking across the pond, and more in America. It’s something that Ruwart also sees in the American cheese community: There are no limits.
Trial and Error
Stateside, the key artisanal cheese epicenters are California, Wisconsin, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts. These regions are home to a wide range of makers and mongers alike, but an excess of innovation can have poor business implications.
For example, Ruwart regularly sees cheesemakers leaning into creativity and launching a dozen different products. But making the same small-batch food deliverable consistently is hard work, and easier to manage with fewer varieties. It’s also more dependable for cheesemongers who want to receive a reliable amount of the same product every week. If cheesemakers spend too much time experimenting, it’s hard to deliver on that promise.
One business opportunity that Ruwart sees is cheesemakers leaning into seasonality and limited edition cheeses. Cows don’t eat the same food all year. They rotate between grass in the warm months, and different varieties of fodder, such as hay, in the cold ones. The taste of their milk changes, so cheesemakers can go far if they tap into the inherent uniqueness of milk at any one time and create something magical.
But seasonality is just the beginning. Aging, toppings, and direct-to-consumer pathways mean that perhaps the best is yet to come. Take Beehive Cheese based in Utah, which crafts wedges coated with Earl Gray tea and lavender espresso. Then there’s Devil’s Gulch from Cowgirl Creamery in Northern California, a triple-cream cheese topped with dried red chili pepper. And there’s Jasper Hill Creamery, which binds a variety of their winter cheese with spruce bark from the local forest in Vermont.
“In the future, there’s going to be new artisan-style cheeses that will blow even our minds at CDR,” O’Brien said. “It’ll be like, ‘How did they even come up with that?’”
