US Cottage Cheese Curd Hits 514 Million Pounds: AMPI Hands A Cheddar Plant Over And The Sweet Whey Goes With It

Most of the coverage reads cottage cheese as a protein trend. I read it as a swap. Vats that used to make cheddar are being handed to it.

US cottage cheese curd output hit 514.3 million pounds in 2025. That is up 14.7% on the year, USDA figures show. All other cheese grew 4.0%.

A cheddar plant is being handed over

Associated Milk Producers Inc is turning its Blair plant in Wisconsin from cheddar to cottage cheese. The co-op said the switch takes about a year. Around 86 staff went on temporary layoff from 31 March 2026. AMPI expects to reopen in early 2027. It says Blair will then be one of the largest cottage cheese plants in the country.

Member milk goes to nearby plants while the work runs. That is a year of throughput moved off site. A co-op cannot stop taking milk from its farms, so the milk has to go somewhere. The real cost of the switch sits in that year, rather than in the equipment bill.

Westby cut the ribbon on 9 September

Westby Cooperative Creamery finished a project worth close to $15 million and cut the ribbon on 9 September. A USDA Rural Development guarantee backed $14.1 million of it. The co-op says the new kit lifts its cottage cheese capacity by 50%.

The equipment is a closed vat built by Nordic Dairy Technology of Denmark. Jon Fosse, who founded the firm, said it is the first in the United States. The old way uses an open vat and a 70-pound knife to cut the curd by hand. Westby was already sold out at about 13.1 million pounds a year. The new vat adds 6 to 7 million pounds. The extra is sold as well.

Nobody loses a job. Staff move into maintenance and warehousing. The co-op began in 1903 and its farms average 38 cows. The plant on Main Street is 100 years old. It is the only cottage cheese maker in Wisconsin.

The numbers behind the spend

Cottage cheese curd grew nearly four times faster than the rest of cheese last year. Curd reached 514.3 million pounds, up 14.7%. Creamed cottage cheese reached 470.8 million pounds, up 11.7%. Lowfat reached 422.2 million pounds, up 11.4%. Cheddar grew 5.8% to 4.00 billion pounds.

The pull is coming from the shelf. The National Milk Producers Federation puts retail cottage cheese sales up 40% between 2022 and 2025. AMPI says demand is at its highest level since 2009. Both co-ops say the same thing about that demand. They cannot serve it with the vats they own.

The whey changes with the vat

Cheddar makes sweet whey, and sweet whey is what dry whey and WPC80 are made from. Cottage cheese makes acid whey instead. Acid whey sits at a pH of 4.3 to 5.6. It carries more ash and more organic acid. Few buyers want it. It also has a high oxygen demand in water, so most of it is a cost to remove.

US dry whey output fell 1.0% to 845 million pounds in 2025, while cheese rose 4.0%. Some of that is whey moving into richer fractions. Whey protein concentrate rose 2.1% and lactose rose 2.6%. Even so, a vat that leaves cheddar leaves the sweet whey pool for good.

Fresh cheese travels badly

A cheddar plant makes something that keeps, and a cottage cheese plant does not. Blair's 40-pound blocks could age, sit in store and move on the exchange or abroad. Cottage cheese lasts weeks rather than months. It has to sell close to home and sell fast.

That changes who you sell to as much as the vat does. A block plant sells to traders, to makers and to export buyers. A cottage cheese plant sells to chilled retail, and chilled shelf space is finite. Both co-ops have pre-sold their new output. That tells you the shelf is pulling hard today. It also tells you how quickly it could stop.

What to do about it

Price the acid whey before you price the vat. Ask where the sweet whey went if you buy protein. Check how much of your supplier's cheddar capacity has moved. Count the tonnes, rather than the sales growth. Book chilled shelf space early if you are building. Treat pre-sold volume as a snapshot and re-check it every year.

Two plants are easy to report. The harder number is how many tonnes of cottage cheese a country makes. And what it stopped making to get there. Our Global Cheese Database 2026 tracks cottage and quark as its own type, in tonnes. It covers 48 markets, next to cheddar and mozzarella. The waitlist comes with a free sample country chapter.