A member wrote in this week describing a scene a lot of you will recognize: a walk-in that's fuller than it's ever been, a wholesale account that stopped answering emails, and a farmers' market that just got canceled for the second Saturday running. Selling direct to the household that would normally buy your cheese at a restaurant or a market stall has gone, in the space of three weeks, from a nice-to-have side channel to the whole plan for some of you. It is not a seamless swap, and it's worth being honest about what it actually takes.
The parts that are harder than they look
Curbside and mail order both sound simple until you're doing them. A curbside pickup line needs a posted schedule, a way to take payment without a lot of hand-to-hand contact, and a system so an order placed by phone or email actually matches what gets handed out the window — mixing up two family orders on your busiest day does more damage to a new customer relationship than a slow line does. Shipping cheese is its own craft: insulated packaging, ice packs sized to your transit time, and a real answer for what happens if a box sits on a porch in an 80-degree afternoon. None of that is hard to learn. It is hard to improvise for the first time under pressure, which is exactly the position a lot of members are in right now.
Pricing the channel, not just the cheese
Direct sales usually carry a better margin per pound than wholesale, but they also carry costs wholesale never charged you — packaging, shipping, and the labor of running a pickup line or packing a mail order box. A price that worked at the farmers' market table doesn't automatically work once you've added a $9 insulated box and next-day shipping. Members who've made this switch well tend to treat it as pricing a new product, not moving an old one to a new counter.
Our Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course covers the practical build: setting up an order system that won't fall over on your first busy weekend, packaging that survives a porch delivery, and a pricing worksheet that accounts for the costs a wholesale account used to absorb for you. If you've never sold direct before, start there rather than guessing your way through a first week of mail orders.
If direct sales are new to your operation, keep the first version simple. A weekly order window, a short fixed menu, and pickup at a set time beats a sprawling online store you don't have the staff to run. You can always add complexity once the basics are holding. Several members who already had some direct channel in place before this month told us the same thing: the version that worked was the boring, reliable one, not the ambitious one.
If you're building this out and want a second set of eyes on your plan, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding exactly these questions this week — reach out through the member portal and we'll get you connected.
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.