Mark your calendar: our Webinar on Water Activity & Shelf Life runs next month, and registrations have picked up faster than we expected this year. If you've been rethinking your packaging or wrap this spring — and plenty of members have, given how tight materials have been — this is a timely one to sit in on.
Water activity is one of those measurements that quietly governs a lot of decisions in a cheese room without getting much airtime. It's the figure that tells you how a wheel will behave once it leaves your cave: whether it's stable at room temperature on a retail shelf, how much moisture migration to expect through a given wrap, and how sensitive your product is to a packaging substitution. That last point matters more than usual right now, with several members swapping wrap materials or suppliers under pressure and needing to know whether the change affects how their cheese ages once it's sealed.
Trade coverage this month has been full of manufacturers reformulating and resourcing around packaging gaps — new film suppliers, new case sizes, new label stock — often faster than anyone would choose under normal conditions. That's a reasonable response to a real shortage, but it also means more products are being packaged in materials that weren't part of the original shelf-life plan. A water activity reading is one of the simplest ways to check, after the fact, whether a substitution actually changed anything.
What the session covers
The webinar walks through how to measure water activity with equipment most creameries can access, how to read the number against your product's risk category, and how packaging choices — film thickness, breathability, even case ventilation — interact with that number over a product's shelf life. It's built for people who make decisions about wrap and packaging, not just food-safety staff, which is part of why we expect it to be useful this particular spring.
There's also a section on documentation: what a buyer or auditor typically wants to see if you've changed a packaging material recently, and how to build a simple record that shows you considered the shelf-life impact before you made the switch. If you've made a supplier substitution in the last month because of the packaging crunch, that's worth having on file regardless of whether anyone asks for it. It's a short exercise now, and a much shorter conversation later if a buyer asks why a wrap looks different than it did last season.
How to prepare
Registration is open now through our events page, and the session is free to attend as part of your membership. If you can, bring a water activity reading from your own product — even an old one — so the worked examples land closer to home. Members who've taken our Listeria Control in Small Creameries course will recognize some of the underlying concepts, though this session stands on its own and doesn't assume you've taken it.
We'll send a reminder the week before with the video link and a short pre-read, and we'll leave time at the end for questions specific to your own setup — cave humidity, cheese type, and whatever wrap you've landed on this year all change the answer. In the meantime, if you have questions about how a specific packaging change might affect your product's shelf life, our Food Safety Committee is a good place to start, and they've been fielding more of these calls than usual this spring.
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.