A year ago, Highland Meadow Curds looked like it might become one more name on the list of creameries that didn't make it through. The founder was ready to retire, the milking side of the operation had already been sold off to a neighbor, and the aging room — three decades of accumulated house culture and a reputation built one competition entry at a time — was the kind of asset that gets liquidated quietly when nobody in the family wants the second shift and the 4 a.m. starts that come with it. Renata Castillo wanted it. This week marks a year since she formally took over as head cheesemaker, and we asked her what the handover actually looked like once the paperwork was done.
"Everyone talks about succession like it's one meeting where you sign something," she told us. "It's really a hundred small meetings. What temperature does he actually run the vat at versus what the sheet says. Which supplier will pick up the phone for a rush order and which one won't. None of that transfers on a piece of paper."
What eased and what didn't
Renata's story lands at a useful moment for us to tell it. We spent most of last year writing about creameries that closed, and those stories were true and worth telling. But the same pressures that forced some operations to shut down pushed others toward exactly this kind of transition instead — a founder stepping back rather than shutting the doors, a successor stepping in while there was still something worth stepping into. Industry reporting on farm transitions has made the same point at a larger scale: the operations that make it through a generational handover tend to be the ones where the successor was already doing real management work well before ownership changed hands, not the ones where a plan got assembled in a hurry at the end.
That was mostly true here. Renata had worked alongside her father for six years before the formal handover, which she says made the technical side easier than she expected. The harder part was learning to make decisions he wouldn't have made — dropping one style that wasn't selling, adding a washed-rind wheel he'd always been skeptical of, changing a distributor relationship that had gone stale. "He built something worth keeping," she said. "Keeping it doesn't mean I have to run it exactly like he did."
What she'd tell the next person in her position
Her advice for other members facing a similar transition is practical rather than sentimental: get into the operational details years before the ownership conversation happens, write down the things that live only in someone's head, and expect the first year after the handover to feel slower than it should, because you're relearning decisions someone else used to make without thinking. The federation's Education Committee has started fielding more questions like Renata's over the past year, and if you're facing your own version of this, the committee is a reasonable first call — not for the legal or financial side, but for the practical, cave-and-vat-level version of the same conversation.
Highland Meadow Curds enters this year with the same name on the label and a different hand on the vat. Renata says that's exactly the outcome she was working toward.
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.