In honor of the upcoming Olympics being held in Paris in summer 2024, our November State of the Industry report uses a sports theme. The report takes an in-depth look at the growth and innovation in such categories as milk, cheese, ice cream and cultured dairy, discussing top brands and dollar sales. In Dairy Foods Extra, several top dairy executives explore the challenges of the industry, including staffing, pricing and sustainability.
While it is typically obvious when a team wins, loses or ties (although ties are a rarity in sports these days), in the commodity export world, a win depends on how you define it.
When U.S. American gymnast and seven-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles goes for the gold at the XXXIII Olympic Summer Games in Paris next year, the 4’ 8” dynamo will bring her artistry, strength, and power to the vault (Yurchenko double pike vault, now named the Biles II), floor exercise, balance beam, and parallel bars.
In terms of ice cream and frozen novelty sales, matching a “Super Bowl champion”-level performance like those of the Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes in 2020 and 2023, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic for ice cream, when consumers sought a home indulgence, is difficult to replicate.
The pickleball craze is sweeping the nation. While the sport began in Washington State in 1965, the number of people playing pickleball today is skyrocketing.
Although perhaps not the impressive gold-medal victory achieved by the U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team over the Russian’s in 1980 in Lake Placid, N.Y., most areas of the non-dairy market are scoring plenty of goals, with the exception of the juice market, which is biding its next chance to skate through a slump.
Natural cheese — and the diverse types of shredded, chunks, slices, string/stick, crumbled, cubes, ricotta, and all other forms — generated $17.4 billion in dollar sales, a year-over-year (YoY) increase of 7%.
Milk is getting knocked down by changing consumer demographics and attitudes, but a comeback is viable for the nearly $15.6B category. Milk sales are up due to higher prices, while unit sales fell 3.1%
Take a quick look at the data, and you will observe that dairy product sales across the industry have seen good year-over-year (YoY) dollar growth at retail.