The inspection backlog, and what we’re asking on your behalf

If your creamery had a routine domestic food-safety inspection scheduled for late December or January, there's a decent chance it didn't happen. A lapse in federal funding shut down most routine inspections of domestic processing facilities for over a month this winter, and while the lapse itself ended in late January, the queue it left behind is still working itself out. Inspectors have been calling back staff to clear the highest-risk backlog first, which is the right call from a public-safety standpoint, but it also means small and mid-size creameries — the ones least likely to be flagged as high-risk — are sitting further back in that line than they'd normally be.

What this means if you're waiting

A delayed routine inspection is not a compliance violation on your part, and it shouldn't be treated as one by anyone downstream in your supply chain — a distributor or retail buyer who raises it as a red flag is misunderstanding what happened. Keep your own records current regardless: your last internal audit, your HACCP plan, your cleaning and sanitation logs. If a buyer or partner asks why an inspection date has slipped, "the routine schedule is still recovering from the funding lapse" is an accurate answer, not an excuse.

Our Food Safety Committee has been collecting notes from members whose inspections were delayed, and we're using that record to push two specific asks: a clearer public timeline for when routine domestic inspections return to normal cadence, and assurance that the backlog gets worked through in the order facilities were originally scheduled, not just by risk tier. Neither ask requires new legislation — both are about how an existing process gets un-paused. If your inspection was pushed and you haven't told us about it, that's exactly the kind of data point that makes the case stronger; let the committee know through the member portal.

Where this connects to what you can control

None of this changes what food-safety compliance actually requires of your operation — the rules didn't pause along with the inspections. If anything, a delayed routine visit is a good excuse to run your own internal check before someone else does. Pull your last self-audit, walk your allergen-control points against your current label set, and make sure your recall plan still names the right people at the right phone numbers; small creameries especially tend to let a recall contact list go stale once the person who wrote it moves on. If you want a refresher on where your allergen controls or your HACCP documentation stand against current requirements, that's exactly the ground our upcoming Workshop: Cedar Packaging session touches on alongside its packaging focus, and it's a reasonable session to send a QA lead to even if packaging isn't your main question this month.

We also want to be clear about what we're not asking for. We are not asking for lighter inspection standards, faster sign-offs, or any softening of what a facility has to demonstrate to pass. The ask is narrower than that: predictability about timing, and a fair queue. A creamery that was three weeks from its scheduled visit in December shouldn't end up six months behind a facility that was already due for reinspection, just because the second one happens to sit in a higher risk tier on paper. Our Food Safety Committee has said as much in the notes it's compiling, and that framing seems to be landing without much pushback so far — nobody we've talked to on any side of this wants the backlog worked through in a way that looks arbitrary.

If your facility falls into the small end of our membership — a single-room creamery, a part-time cheesemonger operation, a seasonal producer — you are statistically the most likely to still be waiting. That's not a guess; it follows directly from how risk-tiering works. If that's you, letting the committee know isn't just about your own case. It's what turns "we think this is happening" into "here is the pattern, and here is how many members it touches."

We'll keep this page updated as the backlog clears and as we hear back on the committee's asks. In the meantime, over-document rather than under-document, and don't let a delayed visit read as a clean bill of health you haven't actually earned yet.

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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.