Tuesday's Workshop: Birch Retailing is one of the smaller events on this spring's calendar, and also one of the ones we get the most questions about, mostly some version of "why there?" The session runs in person, and it's built for counter staff and case managers rather than producers, which is a narrower audience than most of our workshops and, we think, a better one for the material.
The agenda is deliberately unglamorous: case layout and eye-line placement, how to sequence a tasting flight for a walk-in customer who has four minutes, and a block on shrink — the wheels that don't sell before they age past their window, and what that actually costs a counter over a year. None of it is new information to a fifteen-year monger. Most of it is information a first-year hire has never had explained to them in one sitting, which is who this workshop tends to fill up with.
Why a workshop like this travels
Retailing workshops don't get the attention that competition events or the annual conference does, but they're some of the most consistently full sessions we run, because the problem they solve — a counter that's busy but not necessarily profitable — doesn't care what region it's in. A cheese case in a coastal specialty shop and one in an inland grocery cheese department are managing the same shrink math with different traffic patterns, and putting members from both rooms together tends to surface fixes neither side would have found alone.
That's also why we've stopped assuming these sessions only make sense stateside. Specialty cheese demand has been climbing across a wider set of markets over the past few years — brand refreshes, new artisanal ventures, and a general resurgence in shoppers seeking out cheese with a story attached to it, by most of the trade coverage we've been reading this spring. A counter-management workshop lands just as well in front of a room that's scaling a specialty case for the first time as it does in front of one that's been running one for a decade.
What to do if you can't attend, and what doesn't fit on a slide
The workshop isn't recorded live, but the slide deck and a written summary of the shrink-math exercise go into the member resource library within a week of the session, and we'll flag it in the next newsletter once it's posted. If your counter team is small enough that sending someone to a one-day workshop is a real scheduling problem, that write-up is built to be usable on its own — no video required, just the worksheet and forty minutes with your case data.
Members who want a longer version of this material outside of a single workshop should also look at Counter Culture: Retailing, one of our standing course offerings, which spends several sessions on the same shrink and layout questions with more room to work through your own numbers. Contact the Events Committee if you'd like the Birch Retailing agenda emailed ahead of a future run closer to home.
That written summary, though, will only carry so much. The hardest thing to teach in a one-day format is judgment: knowing when a wheel that's three days from its ideal window should move to a discount table versus when it should hold, because a customer who's been asking about it all week is due in on Thursday. Birch Retailing spends its last hour on exactly that kind of case-by-case call, working through real scenarios the facilitators pull from member questions submitted ahead of time. It's the part attendees mention most in the post-workshop survey, and it's genuinely hard to reproduce on paper, which is our honest answer to anyone weighing whether the trip is worth it.
We also hear, every time we run a session like this, from members who assumed a retailing workshop wasn't for them because they don't run a walk-in counter at all — a farmers' market stand, a wholesale-only creamery, an online-order operation. The shrink math and the case-layout thinking underneath it still applies any time you're deciding how much finished product to have on hand and how to present it, even if "the case" is a cooler at a Saturday market. If that's your situation, the course version is probably the better entry point, since it has room to adapt the exercises to a setup that isn't a traditional retail counter.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.