Next Tuesday, September 1, the federation is running its Webinar: Listeria Control 2026, a free session built around environmental monitoring and swab-mapping for small creameries. It was scheduled well before this summer's headlines, but the timing works out: a multi-state soft-cheese listeria investigation that ran through the spring and early summer was declared over by federal health authorities in August, and members have been asking sharper questions about their own monitoring plans since it wrapped up.
To be clear about what this webinar is and isn't: it is not commentary on that specific outbreak, and the federation isn't in a position to say what happened at any particular plant. What it is, is a practical look at the tool every member with a wet processing environment should already have — a documented swab map — and how to tell whether yours is actually doing its job or just satisfying a checklist somebody filled out once and filed away.
What a swab map is supposed to catch
A swab map is only useful if it's built around where contamination is likely to hide, not where it's easiest to swab. The webinar walks through zone classification — drains, floor mats near the vat, condensation lines, equipment seams — and how to rotate testing sites so a facility isn't unintentionally sampling the same easy spots every week while harder-to-reach zones go untested for months at a stretch. That rotation matters more than the raw number of swabs a facility runs; a map that hits twenty easy points and misses the three hard ones isn't actually protective.
It also covers the part members most often get wrong on their own: what to do with a positive result that isn't in your finished product. A hit on a drain or a floor zone is not automatically a product recall, but it does require a documented response — increased sampling, targeted cleaning, and a record of what you found and what you did about it. Members without a plan for that moment tend to either overreact, pulling product that was never at risk, or underreact, treating an environmental hit as routine when it should trigger a closer look. The webinar walks through a middle path: a written response plan you can follow calmly instead of improvising under pressure.
Who this is for
The session is aimed at cheesemakers and quality managers at small and mid-sized creameries, particularly anyone making soft, fresh, or surface-ripened styles where listeria risk runs highest. It counts toward continuing education for the Food Safety & HACCP Certificate, and the recording will be available afterward for members who can't make the live session or want to walk a new hire through it later in the fall.
Demand for artisan and farmstead cheese has stayed strong this year by most industry measures, which is exactly why a clean environmental monitoring record matters — it's what lets a small producer keep selling into that demand without a single bad test derailing a season's worth of work. If your facility hasn't reviewed its environmental monitoring plan since it was first written, this is a reasonable prompt to do it before fall production ramps up. Registration is open now through the federation's events calendar; there's no cost to attend.
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.