The Dairy Mail
Published by Dairy Connect
More from Milk.
Independent news and analysis for the global cheese and dairy industry, reported from the UK and Ireland. The route to value, one pillar at a time.
Latest issue
The Protein Plant
7 October 2026
Focus
Five pillars. One thesis.
Every piece we publish files against one of five pillars. Protein & Nutrition works the solids, Provenance & Premium the origin, Retail & Foodservice the route to the plate, Markets & News what is moving the sector, and Sustainability & Technical how it is made.
Latest
What we're reading now.
Cheddar rises 9% in a month and still trails the milk price
Mild Cheddar rose 9% in September, taking a litre made into Cheddar and whey to 39.08 pence and putting cheese back above butter and powder at the factory gate, but the October milk price rises were announced weeks before that figure was published, and AHDB says Cheddar prices remain too low to cover them.
29 September 2026
The invoice arrives this autumn. Nobody can tell you what it says.
The most expensive packaging decision available to a mid-sized processor this year is not a material decision at all: packaging with missing recyclability data is rated red, so 100 tonnes rated red by default rather than by design costs £13,000 more than the same tonnage rated green — larger than the gap between a realistic pack mix and a perfect one.
22 September 2026
The three numbers in your packaging budget are last year's
Year-two EPR resets the rate and starts charging on recyclability, so the number worth working out this month is not tonnage times rate but the red, amber and green split — and how much of the red is red only because an assessment was never submitted.
21 September 2026
The value test at both ends of the chain
Protein's growth lead over the wider market has more than halved since January while wholesale Cheddar has barely moved as milk gets dearer, so the processor is squeezed from the shelf and the wholesale market at once, and cheese makers meet the margin test first.
15 September 2026
What the week returned
Two of the three routes out of a British dairy can be compared against a declared standard every month while the third has to be argued from first principles each time; whether that changes any capital decision is still unevidenced, and each role in the chain has one thing to do about it on Monday.
11 September 2026
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