For most of the ten years she has been making cheese, our member spotlight this week sold almost everything she produced to two regional distributors and never spoke to a single person who was actually going to eat the cheese. That changed in April, when she set up her first table at a Saturday farmers' market near her creamery — a decision she describes as overdue rather than sudden.
"I'd been thinking about it for two or three seasons," she told us. "Wholesale is steady, and I'm not walking away from it. But the margin on a wholesale account is thin, and everyone kept telling me the same thing: a market table is where you actually meet the people buying your cheese, and where the margin looks completely different." She runs a small farmstead operation with a herd under seventy head, aging most of her cheese in a converted milk house she and her spouse built out themselves.
Part of what pushed her to finally do it was the wider market for cheese this year. Milk supply has been running ahead of demand nationally, which has kept wholesale prices soft even as overall cheese demand holds up — a combination that has quietly squeezed a lot of small wholesale-only producers on margin without showing up as a crisis anywhere. Selling direct was less an experiment for her than a hedge against exactly that squeeze.
What surprised her
The learning curve was not the cheese — she has that part down cold. It was everything around it. "Nobody tells you how much of market selling is just talking," she said. "At the distributor, I ship a pallet and get an invoice back. At the table, I'm explaining what 'washed rind' means to someone who's never heard the term, forty times in a row, in the same four hours." She said the repetition wore on her at first, until she realized the same questions were a chance to figure out which one line actually sold the cheese, and to stop explaining the parts nobody asked about.
Pricing was the other surprise. Distributor pricing is negotiated once a year and then mostly forgotten. At a market table, she is setting a retail price directly, in front of the customer, every single week — and she said it took a few markets before she stopped underpricing out of habit. "I was still thinking like a wholesale account for the first month. I had to remind myself this is not the same math."
Labeling was the third thing, and the one she says she underestimated most. Her home state allows on-farm and market sales of her aged raw-milk cheeses with a permit, but the disclosure language required at a market stand is more detailed than what she had been putting on a wholesale case label for years. With federal attention on interstate raw-milk sales tightening this year, she has also gotten stricter about telling out-of-state customers she cannot ship to them — a conversation she says happens at almost every market now.
She is now four months in and says the direct-to-consumer side of her business is still a small share of total revenue, but it is the part she is most interested in growing. She enrolled in the federation's Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course starting this week, mostly, she said, for the labeling and pricing modules rather than anything about the cheese itself. "I know how to make it. I'm still learning how to sell it to one person at a time instead of one pallet at a time."
If you are a longtime wholesale producer thinking about your own first market table, or you have already made the jump and have lessons the rest of us should hear, the Membership & Outreach Committee is collecting stories like hers for a future roundup — a note through the member portal reaches them directly.
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.