We scheduled Webinar: Costing a Make 2020 back in the spring, when the plan was simply to give members a free, hour-long refresher on building a real cost basis for a wheel — milk, cultures, labor, aging shrink, packaging — instead of pricing off what the case next to yours charges. It goes live September 9. We didn't plan it around a soft cheese market or a storm that just put feed costs in question across a chunk of the country, but here we are, and the timing turns out to matter more than we expected.
Why this one, why now
This has been a hard month to price confidently. Block cheddar has been drifting down for weeks, the federal milk price came in under $20 per hundredweight in August, and Monday's derecho has left a real question mark over fall feed costs for anyone in its path or buying from someone who is. None of that tells you what your wheel actually costs to make. It tells you what the wholesale market is doing, which is a different number, and conflating the two is exactly what this webinar exists to prevent.
We hear a version of the same story every time the wholesale market gets shaky: a member drops their retail price to "stay competitive" with the case next door, without knowing whether that price was ever covering their real costs in the first place. In a normal month that's a slow leak. In a month like this one, with feed costs an open question for a good stretch of the country, it can turn into a fast one.
The session walks through a simple worksheet: your real milk cost per wheel including whatever premium you pay for quality or volume, your culture and rennet cost, labor hours at an honest rate rather than what you'd like to believe you're paying yourself, aging shrink by cheese type, and packaging. It's free, virtual, and open to all members — no cheesemaking experience required to follow along, though you'll get the most out of it if you bring your own numbers to work through live.
We'll also spend a few minutes on the part most cost worksheets skip: what to do once you know the number. A cost basis is only useful if you're willing to act on it, whether that means adjusting a wholesale price, having a harder conversation with a distributor, or deciding that a particular style simply isn't worth making at current input costs. None of that is comfortable, but pricing blind is worse.
Who should show up
If you've never built a formal cost sheet and have been pricing by feel or by comparison to the cheese case, this is squarely for you. If you have a cost sheet but haven't revisited it since spring, this is also for you — feed and milk costs move, and a cost basis built in March is not a cost basis you can trust in September. And if your operation was hit by this week's storm and you're facing an unplanned repair bill or a generator rental on top of everything else, understanding your real margin before you make any pricing decisions under pressure is worth the hour.
Registration is open now through the events page; there's no fee and no cap on attendance for a virtual session like this one. We'll send a plain-text worksheet template to registrants a few days ahead so you can start filling in your own numbers before the call rather than during it. Bring questions about your own make — the session leaves time for them.
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.