Last year we spoke with a lot of members who weren't sure their creamery would still exist in twelve months. This week we caught up with one of them — a farmstead maker in the upper Midwest who runs a small aged-cheddar and tomme operation off her family's dairy herd — and the story has, for once, a genuinely good turn in it.
Through most of 2025 she was making cheese alone, milking a shrinking herd, and watching feed costs eat into a margin that was already thin. "I kept telling people I was fine," she told us, "and I wasn't lying exactly, I just wasn't looking past the next milk check." She'd cut her herd twice that year and had started quietly asking other members at ICF events whether anyone knew a buyer for the cave equipment, in case it came to that.
The conversation that changed the math
It didn't come to that, in the end. A former apprentice from a nearby operation — someone she'd mentored briefly a few years back — approached her in late winter about buying into the business instead of watching it close. Neither of them had done anything like it before, and she credits an ICF workshop on transferring ownership in a small creamery with giving them a framework to actually structure the conversation, rather than just a handshake and a hope.
"We split up what mattered," she said. "I kept the herd and the recipes. She brought capital for a second vat and took over the wholesale relationships, because that's what she's actually good at and I'm not." The partnership closed in April. There's a second vat running now, and for the first time in two years she's not the only person who knows how the aging schedule works — which matters more than it sounds like, she says, the first time you take an actual weekend off.
The two of them split the aging room down the middle for now — her existing wheels on one side, the new partner's small batch of a washed-rind style she's experimenting with on the other. It's an awkward setup, temperature-wise, and they're already talking about a second cave built into the bank barn next spring if the wholesale accounts hold. Neither of them is treating that as guaranteed.
What she'd tell other members
Her advice for members in a similar spot isn't romantic. "Don't wait until you're desperate to have the conversation," she said. "I waited until I was down to one option, and it happened to work out, but I got lucky on timing more than I got smart." She's now recommending the same ownership-transfer materials to two other members she knows who are quietly weighing the same decision she was a year ago.
She's also candid about what almost didn't work: the two of them nearly split on how to value the recipes and the customer list against the new partner's cash contribution, and it took a third member — someone who'd been through a similar transfer a few years back — sitting in on one conversation to get the numbers to a place both of them could live with. "Bring in someone who's done it," she said. "Don't try to invent the whole structure yourselves at the kitchen table."
Milk price forecasts have been easing through the spring rather than climbing, and butter and cheese prices have been drifting down along with them, which she reads as a market settling rather than one still climbing out of a hole. She's cautiously optimistic that takes some pressure off the kind of decision she had to make last year. But she's also clear that the partnership isn't a hedge against the market — it's a business decision she thinks she should have made regardless of the price of milk. If you're weighing a similar structure for your own operation, the succession materials from this year's Annual Conference program are a reasonable place to start before you're the one asking around for a buyer.
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.