A member wrote us this week from a creamery she runs with her husband in the upper Midwest, doing what a lot of small operations are doing right now: closing out the books on a year that looks nothing like the one they budgeted for in January. Wholesale accounts that used to take three cases a week disappeared by April. A farmers market that ran May through October ran May through July, then folded early. A mailing list of forty names in February grew to over six hundred by December, and that's where most of this year's cheese actually went.
She told us the wholesale line on her spreadsheet is the smallest it's been in five years and the direct-to-consumer line is the largest it's ever been, and the two roughly canceled out. Revenue for the year came in close to flat. "I keep waiting to feel bad about it," she wrote, "and then I remember what January looked like and I don't."
What the shift actually cost
It wasn't free. Building a mail-order operation from scratch meant new packaging, new shipping accounts, and a lot of trial and error on what survives three days in a box in December versus July. She estimates she lost a dozen wheels this year to bad ice packs and one very memorable week where a carrier delay turned a two-day shipment into a five-day one. Those are real losses that don't show up cleanly on a year-end statement, and she's not alone — we've heard versions of this story from members all year.
The bigger cost was hours. Running a mailing list, packing boxes, and answering the phone for a direct customer base is a different job than restocking a wholesale account, and it landed on top of the making, not instead of it. She's hired her first part-time help for January, something that wasn't in this year's plan either.
What she's carrying into next year
Two things, she told us. First, a direct customer list she intends to keep even once wholesale accounts come back, because those relationships turned out to be worth more than she expected — steadier, more forgiving on price, more likely to ask about the cheese itself rather than just the case count. Second, a much better sense of her real cost per wheel once shipping, packaging, and the hours she hadn't been counting are included. That number surprised her, and not in a good way, and she's planning to reprice her mail-order line in January to reflect it.
If you're doing a similar year-end reckoning, our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of true-cost accounting, and it's worth doing before you set next year's prices rather than after. However this year landed for you — flat, down, or in a few cases up — writing down what actually changed in your operation, not just your revenue, is the more useful year-end exercise. We'd like to hear yours; reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee if you're willing to share it.
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.