We scheduled our Webinar: Costing a Make for December 31 back in the fall, mostly because it was the only open slot left on the calendar. It turns out to be a reasonable date for the topic. Retail cheese demand has stayed strong through the holidays this year, grocery cheese cases fuller than usual as more people cook and entertain at home. At the same time, the wholesale side of the market has been softer than the retail shelf would suggest, with Class III futures easing through December even as the case in front of your customer looks busy.
That gap between a full case and a soft wholesale number is exactly the kind of thing a make-sheet costing exercise is built to catch. If your sense of how the year went is coming from foot traffic or a gift-box tally rather than your actual cost per wheel, this webinar is worth ninety minutes before you close your books.
What the session covers
We'll walk through building a real cost per wheel from milk price, yield, labor, packaging, and overhead, then comparing that number against what you actually charged this year across your different channels — wholesale, farmers market, and direct-to-consumer if you run one. For a lot of members, this is the first time all three channels get compared side by side rather than tracked separately. The comparison tends to be more useful, and more sobering, than most people expect.
We're also spending time on how to project into next year using this year's numbers, which is harder than usual given how unevenly 2020 landed across channels for different members. A wholesale-heavy operation and a market-stand operation had very different years, and a single blended number from either one won't tell you much about what to expect from 2021.
Federal dairy market reporting this month put block cheese prices below where they sat in November, even as trade press coverage described a grocery cheese case that kept its shelf space through the holidays rather than losing it to other categories. Both of those things can be true at once, and members on both sides of that split — a creamery selling mostly wholesale and one selling mostly direct — will read this webinar's cost worksheet very differently. That's part of why we're running it as one session rather than splitting it by channel: seeing where your own numbers land against the range other members report is more useful than a generic average.
We've run a version of this webinar in past Decembers, but this is the first time we've had this many members asking for it before the calendar year even closes rather than after. Normally the costing conversation happens in late January once the prior year's numbers have settled. This year, enough members told us they wanted to lock in a January price change immediately rather than wait, so we moved the session earlier. If that's you, this is the one to attend live rather than catch on the recording, since the live session leaves more time for questions on your specific mix of channels.
Signing up
The webinar is free to members and runs an hour and a half, starting at 1pm your local time zone — check the events calendar for the exact listing, since we've had a few members catch the wrong time zone on recent sessions. Bring your own numbers if you can; the session is more useful worked against your own make sheet than a hypothetical one. If you can't make the live date, a recording goes up on the member portal within a few days, and the accompanying worksheet is available either way.
However your case looked this December, full or thin, this is the right week to know your real number before you set next year's prices around a guess.
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.