This Thursday, March 17, we're running a free virtual session on whey management — what to do with it, where it can go, and how to stop treating it as a disposal problem. Registration is open now, and there's no cost to attend.
For a lot of smaller operations, whey handling gets solved once, early, and then never revisited. If your creamery is still hauling it off as waste, this session is worth an hour of your Thursday. Options have shifted in the last couple of years, and some of them pencil out a lot better than they used to, especially with hauling costs climbing the way they have this spring.
What the session covers
We've built the agenda around the questions members actually send us, not a generic byproduct-handling checklist:
- Separation basics — sweet whey versus acid whey, and why the distinction changes almost every downstream option available to you.
- On-farm use — feeding whey back to livestock, land application limits, and the paperwork your state may require before you do either.
- Off-take partnerships — how smaller creameries are pairing up with processors or co-ops that want whey as an input, and what a fair arrangement looks like.
- Concentration and drying — a realistic look at what's within reach for a small operation versus what genuinely requires processor-scale equipment.
There's a live Q&A block at the end, and we're keeping it open until every question in the queue gets answered rather than cutting it off at a clock number.
Whey handling sits at an odd intersection right now. Fuel and hauling costs have climbed sharply this month — national gasoline prices hit a record above $4.17 a gallon in early March, and diesel has climbed even faster, which makes "just pay someone to haul it away" a noticeably worse option than it was a year ago. At the same time, whey-derived proteins and dry products have stayed in strong demand, which has kept processor interest firm even as hauling gets pricier. Members who've already made the switch away from simple disposal tell us the economics changed faster than they expected, and several are now fielding inbound interest from buyers instead of paying to get rid of the byproduct.
If you make cheese at any scale, whey is not a footnote in your operation. It is a percentage of every batch, every day, and what happens to it is either a cost you're absorbing or a value you're leaving on the table. That's the calculation this session is built to help you run for your own operation, at your own scale, without needing processor-level equipment to benefit from it.
How to join
Registration is free and takes two minutes on the events page. We'll send the video link and a short pre-read to everyone registered by Wednesday evening, so if you're on the fence, register now and decide later whether you have the hour. The recording will be available afterward to members who register but can't make the live session.
Questions before Thursday? Reach the Events Committee through the member portal and we'll get you an answer before the session starts.
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.