Reopening has not meant one set of rules. It's meant dozens, sometimes changing week to week, sometimes contradicting the guidance a market two counties over is operating under. This week's spotlight post described one member's experience navigating exactly that patchwork at the farmers'-market level. This post is about what we're doing with the reports members like her have been sending us.
Since April, our advocacy team has been logging member accounts of local reopening rules that seem to have been written with a large grocery chain in mind rather than a single-vendor cheese table or a two-person farmstead operation. A spacing requirement that assumes a retail footprint most small producers don't have. A record-keeping rule designed for a facility with a compliance staff, applied without modification to an operation of three people. None of this is malicious — most of it comes from officials moving fast under real pressure — but the effect on our smallest members has been outsized relative to the actual public-health benefit in a lot of the cases we've reviewed.
What we're asking for
Our position, which we've put in writing to the relevant state agencies where members have raised the loudest concerns, is straightforward: small-producer exemptions that already exist in federal food-safety law for things like recordkeeping and facility requirements shouldn't quietly disappear the moment a state layers emergency reopening rules on top. Where a jurisdiction wants stricter public-health measures during reopening — spacing, sampling bans, mask requirements — we're not objecting to the substance. We're asking that the paperwork and compliance burden scale to the size of the operation, the way it already does under existing small-producer provisions, instead of resetting to a one-size-fits-all standard because it was faster to write that way.
We're also asking, more simply, for consistency across neighboring jurisdictions wherever that's realistic. A vendor who sells at three markets across two counties shouldn't need three different playbooks for gloves, signage, and sampling to stay compliant at all of them. We understand local authorities have local reasons for the choices they've made, and we're not asking anyone to abandon a rule that's working. We are asking that, where two nearby jurisdictions reach different conclusions on the same question, someone can explain why.
What we need from you
If your market, county, or state has issued reopening guidance that doesn't account for an operation your size, tell us. Specifics help — the actual requirement, the jurisdiction, and roughly how much it's adding to your costs or your time at the counter. We can't cite "members are frustrated" in a comment letter, but we can cite "a two-person creamery in [region] now needs a dedicated employee-health log format that a twelve-person facility down the road uses, with no distinction made for scale."
This is one of the more concrete, near-term things the federation can do for members right now, and it depends entirely on hearing from you directly rather than reading about your market secondhand. If you want to send a report or just talk through what your local rules currently require, reach the advocacy team through the member portal — we're tracking this actively and expect to have an updated summary for members within the next few weeks.
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.