Registration is open for our in-person costing workshop in Madison later this month, and if the timing feels deliberate, it is. Federal margin-coverage numbers for the program year have been trending in the direction most farmstead members already felt in their own ledgers before the government report caught up — feed costs edging higher month over month, and the cushion between what milk earns and what it costs to feed a herd getting thinner than it was a year ago. A workshop about costing lands differently in a year like this than it would in a flush one.
This isn't a repeat of the pricing course we've talked about in past issues. That one is about setting your floor price by style and format. This workshop is upstream of that — it's about knowing your actual cost per wheel with enough precision that any pricing decision downstream is built on a real number instead of last year's number with a guess added on top.
What a day in Madison actually covers
The session walks through a full cost teardown for a single make: milk cost at your current contract or spot price, cultures and rennet, labor hours broken out by task rather than lumped into "labor," packaging, and the energy cost of holding a cave or cooler at temperature through a full aging cycle. Members who've been through it before tell us the energy line is usually the biggest surprise — not because anyone was ignoring their utility bill, but because nobody had split out what portion of it was actually attributable to a specific batch of cheese sitting in a specific room for a specific number of weeks.
It's a full day, in person, with a working lunch built in rather than treated as a break — deliberately, so members can keep the room and keep talking shop instead of scattering for an hour. Bring your own numbers if you can; the instructors build the session around real make sheets from the room rather than a hypothetical creamery, which means the exercises land closer to your actual business than a generic worksheet would.
If you've already taken our pricing and margin course, this is the natural next step — costing feeds directly into that pricing floor, and members who've done both in sequence tell us the pricing conversation goes faster once the cost side is solid. If you haven't taken either yet, you can start here; costing doesn't require the pricing course as a prerequisite, though we'd point you toward it afterward. This one draws heavily from farmstead and small-batch members, but distributors and retailers are welcome too — understanding what a true cost teardown looks like on the production side tends to make pricing conversations with your suppliers more productive on both ends.
Getting a seat
Seats are limited because the working-lunch format only scales so far before the room stops functioning as a room. If Madison isn't reachable for you this month, let the Events Committee know — enough requests from a region is generally what gets a workshop scheduled there next. In the meantime, if your feed or energy bill has moved twice already this year the way several members' have, this is a good one to put on the calendar before you set next quarter's price sheet, not after.
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.