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The Dryer’s Getting Robbed

The Dryer’s Getting Robbed

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 Flush season is here. Protein solids are up. Global milk production is up. So… Where’s all the skim milk powder? In this episode of The Milk Check, host Ted Jacoby III and the Jacoby team sits down with Martijn Goedhart and Henk-Jan Bouwman of Cefetra Dairy for a European perspective on the volatility rippling through global dairy markets. We talk through how traders got caught short and why the spring flush might not loosen up the skim milk powder/nonfat dry milk market. Plus, are we pricing U.S. out of the export market? We’ll get you up to speed on: Why skim solids are being pulled away from dryers and into protein streamsHow hand-to-mouth buying turned into a short squeezeWhat record-high butter stocks in Europe mean for upside potential Tune in to hear how Europe and the U.S. are navigating one of the most volatile stretches in recent memory. L If you’re making sourcing or coverage decisions right now, don’t miss The Milk Check episode 94: The Dryer’s Getting Robbed. Got questions? We’d love to hear them. Submit below, and we might answer it on the show. Ask The Milk Check TMC-Intro-final Ted Jacoby III: [00:00:00] Coming up on The Milk Check. Martijn Goedhart: You have supply growing, and then you think, “Oh, we’re gonna build stocks.” But then, demand caught up. And quite viciously. Ted Jacoby III: Welcome to the Milk Check from T.C. Jacoby and Company, your complete guide to dairy markets, from the milking parlor to the supermarket shelf. I’m Ted Jacoby. Let’s dive in. This week we are excited to have two special guests, Martijnjn Goedhart and Henk-Jan Bouwman from Cefetra Dairy in the Netherlands. We’ve been working closely with these guys for some time and we thought it would be a great idea given all the craziness and dairy markets going on in the United States, to ask them to give us a little bit of perspective on what’s going on in Europe so we can get a feel for how the global markets are affecting our U.S. dairy markets. Martijn, Henk, thanks for joining us today. Martijn Goedhart: Thanks for having us, Ted. Henk-Jan Bouwman: Thank you, Ted. Ted Jacoby III: I feel like what’s going on in nonfat right now more has an origin in the U.S., but I also noticed that you guys started to feel that maybe this market was gonna be a little bit shorter than we expected over in Europe before we realized it in the U.S. [00:01:00] Tell us about the skim milk powder market in Europe and what’s been going on the last month. Martijn Goedhart: In Europe, we’ve been overwhelmed by milk production growth since the second half of 2025, due to bluetongue, late calving, second peak, as some of us call it. And that has resulted in good outputs, and that output needs to go to the commodities. So, we’ve seen butter stocks build up significantly, and everyone assumed that that would mean that the skimmed stocks were also building up because that’s basically the other product you’re gonna produce when you do butter, right? A few things we, I think, overlooked is like the general protein trend in the world and the demand for protein, both on the whey side as well as on the milk side nowadays. So a lot of protein has ended up in other products than your typical skimmed nonfat production bucket. Adding to that, Europe has been the most competitive source in the world market for a long time. Demand wasn’t great because buyers were buying hand-to-mouth because they would basically wait for that carry to come toward them and buy at the lowest price at the last moment. But [00:02:00] now we see that the exports out of Europe have been great. And that’s been keeping the market clean. I think some traders speculated on lower prices and got caught short, basically needed to cover. And that’s where we are at now. And I think more than ever, if you look at NZX (New Zealand Exchange), this all started with a firmer GDT (Global Dairy Trade), with China stocking up a bit. So, if you look at NZX, CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) and EEX (European Energy Exchange), those markets are starting to correlate better than they did before because everyone’s looking at the developments of the other exchanges and then draw their conclusions for their own home base. And yeah, that cocktail, together with some U.S. developments that we’re gonna dive into, has caused record-high volatility over the last few weeks. Ted Jacoby III: So, Martijn, you’re telling a story that sounds very familiar ‘ cause that’s exactly what we’ve seen here in the U.S. We’re not making anywhere near as much nonfat dry milk as we expected because the protein demand is forcing those skim solids into other places. What are those other places in Europe? Where is that protein being used and what is it being made into in Europe right now? Martijn Goedhart: I think there’s two main [00:03:00] streams. Bear in mind that the milk pressure in Europe was so high that you need to burn milk, and the way to do that is ...
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