Ask most people what an International Cheese Federation member looks like and they'll describe someone running a creamery, working a counter, or buying for a shop. Jamie Fuller does none of those things. Jamie makes cheese at home, writes about it on a blog with a modest but devoted following, and has been one of our more active members since joining in 2023 — which makes for an unusual answer to the question of what membership is actually for.
"I don't have a wholesale account or a case to stock," Jamie told us. "For a while I wondered if I even belonged here, because most of what I saw talked about was scaling a business. But a lot of the technical material — the food safety guidance, the affinage fundamentals course, the forum where people troubleshoot a cave that's running too humid — none of that cares whether you're selling the wheel or just proud of it."
Activity without a storefront
Jamie's engagement doesn't look like most members' on paper: no wholesale volume, no case to report on, membership sitting on the same entry tier it started at. What it does show is one of the highest levels of course participation and forum activity of anyone we track. Jamie has worked through several credential-track courses purely out of curiosity, writes up each attempt on the blog in detail — including the failures, which Jamie says get more reader engagement than the successes — and has become, by informal consensus, one of the people other home cheesemakers in the community turn to first with a question.
"I took a sensory-evaluation course mostly to have language for what I was already tasting," Jamie said, "and ended up using it to explain to blog readers why their first attempt at a bloomy rind tasted flat. That's not a use case anyone designed the course for, but it worked." That kind of cross-pollination — professional-grade material read and reused by someone with no professional stake in it — isn't something membership tiers are built to capture, and we think that's worth naming rather than treating as an edge case.
That instinct tracks with something the wider market has been showing for a while now: at-home cooking and DIY food projects have stayed a strong trend through the last couple of years, with plenty of coverage of home cooks building their own cheese boards and experimenting with flavor and format rather than just buying finished product. Jamie is, in that sense, less an outlier than an early adopter of a pattern our commercial members are only starting to notice: home enthusiasts are often the ones testing a technique or a flavor idea long before it shows up as a request at a specialty counter.
Why this matters beyond one member
It's tempting to read engagement and revenue as the same thing, and for a lot of members they roughly are. Jamie is a useful reminder that they aren't always. A membership that never generates a wholesale order can still generate real value — for the person holding it, and for the community that member is quietly informing. If you're a home cheesemaker wondering whether a membership built around commercial operations has anything for you, Jamie's answer, unprompted, was blunt: "Come for the technical courses. Stay because nobody here makes you feel like a hobbyist for asking a real question."
For our commercial members, there's a smaller lesson too: the questions coming out of the enthusiast side of the community are often a decent early signal for what curious, quality-focused customers are about to start asking for at your own counter. It's worth listening in occasionally, even if you never expect to sell to any of them directly.
If you want to read Jamie's write-ups or just see what a fully non-commercial member's course history looks like, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to the blog and to the community forum threads Jamie's built a following in.
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.