If your cutting station looks anything like ours by mid-December, it's less a workflow right now than a controlled scramble. That's normal for this time of year, and it's exactly why we schedule our cut-and-wrap efficiency webinar for the first week of January instead of the middle of the rush. It's free for members, it's virtual, and it lands on January 5 — right when most shops and creameries are catching their breath and starting to ask what they'd do differently next time.
Why this year makes the timing worth noting
This holiday season has been a genuinely strange one to staff a counter through. Consumer spending is up compared to last year, but a lot of that increase is inflation rather than people actually buying more — overall purchase volume was closer to flat or even slightly down across most of the season, and shoppers bought for fewer people than they did in 2021. For a cut-and-wrap line, that combination can be deceptive: order counts might look steady on paper while your average ticket, your portion sizes, and your rework rate all shift underneath you in ways a busy staff doesn't always have time to notice mid-shift.
Add a year of record farm milk prices into that mix, and the cost of a wasted or over-trimmed wheel matters more in January 2023 than it might have in a milder year. That's the case for a session like this one now, rather than waiting until next fall: the habits your team builds this winter carry a real dollar value attached to them for the rest of the year.
What the session covers, and who should sign up
This isn't a knife-skills demo, and it isn't aimed at anyone building a cutting program from zero. It's built for the person who's already running a working line and wants to find the fifteen or twenty minutes a shift that are quietly getting lost. Past sessions have walked through portion planning against expected sell-through, minimizing rework on wheels that come in slightly off-spec, and organizing a station so the person labeling isn't waiting on the person cutting. None of it is dramatic. All of it adds up over a busy week.
For members who run a retail counter, the timing lines up with a real seasonal pattern: December volume is heavy, but it's also when small inefficiencies get papered over by sheer staffing. January is when you actually have the room to look at your process and fix what December exposed. A few members who've taken this session in past years have told us the biggest change wasn't a new technique — it was rearranging where supplies sit relative to the cutting board, so nobody's crossing the room mid-cut.
We'd point this one at counter and production staff specifically, not just owners and managers. The people running the line day to day are the ones who'll notice whether a suggested change actually saves time or just moves the bottleneck somewhere else. If you're training new hires this winter, it's also a reasonable thing to have them sit in on once they're comfortable with the basics — better to build good habits in January than to unlearn bad ones in June.
Registration is open now through the member portal's events calendar, and as always, it's free for members and open to guests at a modest fee. If you can't make the live session, a recording goes up for members within a few days.
If your team is heading into the last stretch of the holiday rush and you want a quick gut check on your current setup before January, the Education Committee is happy to point you toward a member willing to walk through their own line by phone.
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.