Two years of building most of our food-safety programming for a screen, and it's still a little strange to say this out loud: we're back in a room. The Workshop: Brook Food Safety session lands in Seattle on May 13, and registration is open now if you haven't already gotten on the list.
This one runs a full day, in person, with the kind of hands-on walkthrough that never quite translates the same way over video — swabbing technique, reading your own environmental monitoring results honestly instead of hopefully, and building a corrective-action plan you'll actually follow instead of one that just satisfies an inspector on paper. If you make small-batch cheese, especially anything aged or washed-rind, this is built for your operation's scale, not a plant twenty times your size that already has a dedicated quality team walking the floor every shift.
There's also a broader reason the timing matters this year. Federal regulators have been moving toward an expanded traceability standard that would put additional recordkeeping requirements on a wider list of foods, and soft and aged cheeses are squarely in the conversation. Nothing about that rule is settled yet, and we're not going to tell members to build a whole new system around a requirement that hasn't been finalized. But a workshop built around getting your existing documentation actually right — instead of technically compliant but disorganized — puts you in a better position no matter how the final rule lands.
What to bring
Bring your current sanitation SOP and your last few months of environmental swab results if you have them — the instructors will work with real documents, not hypotheticals, and there's real value in having someone outside your creamery look at what you've actually been recording rather than what you meant to record. If your Listeria control plan has been more aspiration than document, this is also a natural on-ramp into the Listeria Control in Small Creameries course, which goes deeper than a single day allows and gives you a template to work from afterward.
Raw milk producers should know this workshop covers current aging and hold-time practice as it applies to your product, but it isn't legal advice and it isn't a substitute for staying current with your own state's rules — those vary more than people expect, and they change without much warning. We'll flag where the federal conversation is heading, and where it's still genuinely unresolved, but the specifics for your operation are yours to confirm with your own regulator.
Worth the trip
Seattle in May is a genuinely nice place to spend a day out of the creamery, and past workshops like this one have turned into some of our better hallway conversations — the kind where two members compare swab maps over coffee and end up trading a supplier contact by the end of the break. If you're on the fence about the drive, the Food Safety Committee has heard from enough members that these sessions pay for themselves in avoided recalls alone; we'd rather you hear that from us before a bad week convinces you the hard way.
We've also had members tell us, after the fact, that the real value wasn't the material they already half-knew — it was watching an instructor walk through someone else's swab map and explain, out loud, why a particular result was or wasn't a problem. That kind of judgment is hard to teach from a slide, and it's the thing an in-person day still does better than a recorded session.
Seats are limited. If May 13 doesn't work for your schedule, let the Events Committee know — enough requests for a second date and we'll look at adding one later this year, likely on the other coast.
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.