The Events Committee finalised the first half of the calendar this week, so here is the near part of it. Two workshops in February, both in-person, both small enough that you will end up talking to the person next to you, which is most of the point.
Workshop: Cedar Packaging — 18 February, Tandil, Argentina. This one lands at the end of the southern summer, when our Argentine and Australasian members are deep in make season and everybody else is watching a cave through a cold snap. It is a packaging workshop in the practical sense: what to wrap in, when film is doing you a favor and when it is quietly suffocating a rind, how a wedge behaves in a warm car between a market stall and a customer's kitchen, and what your label has to carry before it is allowed anywhere near a shelf.
If you have never sat through a session on breathability, it sounds like the dullest hour of your year. It is not. Members who have made the switch from a film that holds moisture against a washed rind to a paper that lets it breathe tend to describe the result the same way — the cheese they meant to sell finally arrives at the counter.
Workshop: Prairie Food Safety — 27 February, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A day on the practical end of a food safety plan: monitoring that gets recorded, corrective actions that are written down at the time rather than reconstructed later, verification, and environmental monitoring for makers whose hazard analysis calls for it. The timing is deliberate. One of this year's federal compliance steps for certain small-business packing and holding activities falls in late January, and the written-assurance step inside the supply-chain provisions lands in September, so a February day spent on records is a February day well spent.
Aisha Bell, quality manager at Quincewick Creamery, asked us whether the day covers environmental swabbing specifically or stays at the level of "you should have a program". It covers the swabbing — where, how often, what you do with a positive, and how to write the follow-up so it reads as a controlled response rather than a panic. As we said on Wednesday, none of this makes anybody compliant. It makes the paperwork survivable.
The rest of the year, in outline
Three webinars are already fixed and free to members: Judging Standards on 14 May, Wholesale Negotiation on 27 June, and Apprenticeship Programs on 11 July. A second Judging Standards session runs in September for people who miss the spring one, and there is a Rennet Alternatives webinar in December that we suspect will be the most argued-about hour of the year.
Two more workshops are on the calendar for later in the spring — Meadow Affinage on 28 May in Courtenay, British Columbia, and Curd Retailing on 4 June in the Allgäu — and we will preview both properly nearer the time.
Put 16 July in the diary now
The ICF Annual Conference 2019 is in Madison, Wisconsin, on 16 July. Program details are still being assembled by the Events Committee, but the shape is familiar: the annual competition is judged there, the workshop track runs alongside the main program, and a lot of the useful conversation happens in the ten minutes either side of a session rather than during it.
Three things worth doing early rather than late. If you intend to enter the competition, start thinking now about which wheels will be at their best in July, because the categories — Alpine styles, aged cheddar and territorials, soft-ripened, washed rind, blue-veined, fresh and pasta filata — reward a cheese hitting its window, not a cheese that happened to be in the cave. If you want to judge rather than enter, Wednesday's post on credential timelines is the one to read. And if you are traveling internationally, mid-July in Wisconsin books out earlier than you would think.
Registration opens later in the spring; the events pages will carry dates and fees when they do. Questions about the program go to the Events Committee, and questions about the workshop track to the Education Committee, who between them have heard every version of "can I bring a wheel through customs" that exists.
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.