Late this week, federal lawmakers moved a new relief package forward, and it includes a second round of forgivable small-business loans aimed at exactly the kind of members who fill this list: creameries, cheese shops, and distributors with a couple dozen employees or fewer who have already burned through their first round of support and can show a real revenue drop.
We have spent the last several months collecting exactly this kind of story from members — the counter that cut hours in the spring, the creamery that lost its wholesale accounts and rebuilt around mail order, the affineur who mothballed half a cave to save on utilities. None of that is news to you. What might be news is that a second application window looks likely to open in the new year, with eligibility tied to a documented quarter-over-quarter revenue decline against 2019.
What to have ready now
Before any portal opens, three things will save you time later. First, pull your 2019 and 2020 quarterly revenue side by side — lenders will want the comparison in a clean format, not scattered across invoices. Second, confirm your employee count as of the relevant measurement period; the second-round rules tighten the definition of a small business, and creameries that added seasonal holiday staff should check how that affects the count. Third, if you took a first-round loan, gather your forgiveness documentation now rather than during application week, when your lender's support line will be underwater.
We know several members are also weighing whether to wait for full program guidance before applying. That is a reasonable instinct, but the members who moved fastest in the spring round tended to fare better than those who waited for perfect clarity — guidance evolved after applications opened, and lenders adjusted as they went. Our advocacy work this year included submitted comments on relief eligibility for seasonal food producers, and we will keep pushing on the points that matter most to this membership: how seasonal hiring is counted, and whether a creamery that pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales gets penalized for the revenue mix shifting rather than shrinking.
A note on this being a hard year to close out
It has been a genuinely difficult year for a lot of the businesses on this list, and December brought its own strange mix of a strong holiday cheese case and a market that cooled fast once the gift boxes stopped moving. If you are heading into January uncertain about your options, our Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding one-on-one calls from members trying to make sense of relief eligibility, and that is exactly what the committee is for. Reach out before you guess.
We will publish a plain-language rundown of the application requirements as soon as the program guidance is final. In the meantime, get your numbers in order — that part will not change no matter how the final rules shake out.
Membership & Outreach has taken a steady stream of calls this month from members trying to figure out whether they even qualify, and a few patterns keep coming up. Creameries that shifted a meaningful share of sales to direct-to-consumer shipping this year are unsure how that counts against a wholesale-based revenue baseline from 2019 — reasonably so, since the guidance released so far does not spell it out cleanly. Members who took on debt to cover a slow spring, then had a strong holiday season, are wondering whether a good December erases an otherwise rough year on paper. Neither question has a clean answer yet, and we would rather tell you that plainly than guess.
What we can say is that documentation discipline will matter more than optimism here. A member who can produce clean, dated revenue records by quarter is going to move through an application faster than one reconstructing numbers from memory once the window opens, regardless of how sympathetic their year has been. If your bookkeeping has been informal, this is a reasonable moment to tighten it up before, not after, a lender asks for it.
We also want to be honest about scale. A second relief round, even at this size, will not undo a hard year for every business that needs it. What it can do is bridge a specific gap for members who qualify, and our job between now and whenever the application window opens is to make sure you are not caught flat-footed by paperwork you could have gathered over the holidays instead.
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.