Here is Ged Kerr in our latest edition of the Inside Track, sharing key updates from the dairy industry. Milk powders and dairy fats saw significant declines in the latest GDT results, while cheese prices rose and whey derivatives remain in strong demand.
Click here to watch more Inside Track videos.
The Inside Track Podcast
Get up to date on the go. Subscribe and Follow on your preferred app:
Hi and welcome to this installment of the Inside Track. This will be our second last one for 2025. John will not be attending today—he’s been summoned to the North Pole to help with the big man in the red suit in preparation for Christmas Eve. Hope everyone’s well and enjoying the start of the festive season.
Brisbane is full of action at the moment, particularly in the office here. We’ve got the whole team from New Zealand and Melbourne, just about to have our annual Christmas lunch and then into the Christmas party tomorrow. And of course, the Ashes start at the Gabba tomorrow afternoon. Let’s see what happened in the dairy industry last night.
Looking at milk powders on the GDT last night, both full cream and skim milk powder saw declines of 1.6% and 2.4% respectively. Most of the buying for those powders came out of North Asia, with the Middle East still not jumping back in despite these declining prices, which was quite surprising. We did expect pricing to come off slightly but not to that degree. One to watch for the future—whether it’s going to continue to decline or remain firm.
Moving on to the dairy fats, definitely the talk of the town this morning at Maxum HQ: butter dropped 12.4% and AMF dropped 9.8%. That’s the lowest we’ve seen dairy fats in the last 12 months. The main reasoning for this is that there’s been a considerable amount of fats globally with weakening demand. The US product has definitely been stretched far and wide across the globe, with their exports up somewhere in the region of 150 to 180%, with China in particular taking about a 171% increase on their imports from the US. New Zealand is also looking to have about 30% more product in warehouse than they did this time last year, so you can see that the balance there is definitely tipped into showing this decline that we saw last night.
Moving on to cheese, they definitely bucked the trend based on last night’s results—up 7.2% with steady increases across all contracts from C1 to C5. This is expected to remain firm in the short to medium term.
Moving onto the whey derivatives—whey protein concentrate and whey protein isolate—these continue to be very popular and in high demand. With lack of availability domestically and internationally, we’re definitely expecting pricing to remain firm for the short to medium term.
Thanks for tuning in to this edition of the Inside Track. Hope you have a fantastic run up to Christmas and appreciate the pause that you have with family, friends, and loved ones. There is one more GDT option to go as mentioned earlier on and hopefully… Hold on a second. Oh, hello John. Santa’s got you working overtime but you’re going to be here for the next one. Wonderful. John will be doing the next Inside Track for 2025. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year.
