US Cheese Ships At $2.01 A Pound And Lands At $4.10: USTR Opens Its Trade Barrier List To Cheese Exporters

The one question I keep putting to cheese exporters is this. Which barrier actually costs you tonnes? Washington opened the window to answer it on 18 September. The Office of the United States Trade Representative asked exporters a direct question. Name the foreign rules that block your goods.

What Washington asked for

The comments feed the yearly report on foreign trade barriers. The docket is USTR-2026-0498 and comments close on 29 October 2026. USTR set out five buckets for exporters to fill. Import policies, covering duties, quotas, licences and customs practice. Technical barriers, covering standards, labelling and testing. Sanitary and plant health rules. Intellectual property. Subsidies.

Only the first bucket is about money at the border. The other four are about whether the product can be sold at all.

A record year for cheese

US cheese exports are at a record. July shipments came to 143.6 million pounds, a quarter more than a year earlier. That beat the record set in June, 142.1 million pounds. Five straight months have now cleared 135 million pounds. The seven months to July came to 943.7 million pounds, up 24%. USDA published the figures on 4 September.

Where the cheese goes

Nine markets take most of it. Mexico led with 321.1 million pounds, up 32%. South Korea took 130.8 million pounds, up 36%. Then Japan at 87.2 million and Australia at 59.6 million. Saudi Arabia grew fastest of the nine, up 45% to 24.1 million pounds. Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Panama fill out the list. Not one European market appears on it.

The price gap in the data

The two flows do not price the same. Those 943.7 million pounds earned $1.9 billion. That works out at about $2.01 a pound. US cheese imports over the same seven months came to 251.3 million pounds. They cost $1.03 billion, or about $4.10 a pound. America ships cheese out at half what it pays to bring cheese in. Italy alone sent 53.8 million pounds, up 24%.

Export volume rose 24% while export value rose 12%. The dollar a pound fell while the tonnage climbed. That is what winning share on price looks like in a trade table.

Names sit in the list

One of the five buckets is intellectual property. Cheese names live there. The National Milk Producers Federation says the EU uses origin rules to lock up common cheese terms. It names parmesan, asiago, gorgonzola and feta. A duty raises your price, while a name rule takes your product off the shelf. Lawmakers from both parties reintroduced the SAFETY Act in April 2025 to defend those terms in trade talks.

What exporters should do

Treat the October window as a commercial task. List the markets where your cheese is priced out by duty. List the ones where it cannot carry its own name. Those are two different problems with two different fixes. Price barriers move with a trade deal. Name barriers move with a legal text and a much longer clock. Then check whether your 2026 destination map is the market or just the part of it you are allowed into.

This also raises a wider question around how much cheese actually reaches each market, and in which type. That is one of the areas we track across cheese markets in our 2026 research. The Global Cheese Database 2026 builds every trade flow from HS 0406 customs data. It runs to 39 cheese types across 48 markets, in tonnes. A waitlist is open, with a free sample country chapter.