We scheduled this year's webinar on rennet alternatives for April 20 on purpose, not by calendar accident. That's roughly when a lot of our members are placing their spring rennet and culture orders, and we'd rather members walk into that order with current information than place it and wonder afterward whether they picked the right coagulant for a batch they're planning through summer.
The session is free, virtual, and built around a question we hear constantly at the counter and in committee calls alike: when does a microbial or fermentation-produced coagulant actually perform the same as traditional animal rennet in a working cave, not just in a spec sheet. Traditional makers ask because a supplier substitution during a shortage can quietly change a rind's development timeline. Newer makers ask because they're choosing a coagulant source for the first time and the labeling on supplier catalogs isn't always written for someone new to sourcing — "microbial," "fermentation-produced," and "vegetable coagulant" get used loosely even though they behave differently in a vat.
Why this keeps coming up
Rennet sourcing has been a recurring question in our supplier directory listings this year — availability has been inconsistent for a few specific animal-rennet formulations, and members buying from Loomis Microbial Cultures & Rennet or similar suppliers have told us they'd like a clearer sense of what actually changes in a make when you swap sources mid-season. Fermentation-produced chymosin is by far the most widely used coagulant in commercial cheesemaking today precisely because it sidesteps that kind of supply risk, but a handful of our members still hold to animal rennet for style or tradition reasons, and this session isn't trying to talk anyone out of that.
That's exactly the gap this webinar is built to close: not a sales pitch for one coagulant type over another, but a working comparison of set time, curd texture, and downstream aging behavior across the main options members are actually choosing between. We've asked presenters to bring side-by-side make notes rather than slides of enzyme chemistry, because most of our members care less about the biochemistry and more about whether their washed rind sets the same way it did last spring.
Who should block the hour
If you make washed-rind, alpine, or aged cheddar-style wheels where a slower or faster set genuinely changes your schedule, this is worth an hour of your April calendar even if you don't plan to switch anything this year — knowing your alternatives before you need them is cheaper than researching them mid-shortage. Registration is open now through the events page, and as with our other webinars, a recording goes out afterward to everyone registered, whether or not you can attend live.
If rennet sourcing is part of a bigger production-planning question for your operation — batch sizing, seasonal scheduling, that kind of thing — our Education Committee also has members who've sat through this exact decision and are usually happy to compare notes outside the formal session.
One more reason we like scheduling this session in spring rather than fall: overall cheese demand has kept climbing, and steady growth in consumption means steady growth in the volume of coagulant the whole industry is drawing on every year. That's part of why fermentation-produced chymosin has become the default for most commercial makers — it scales in a way a calf-rennet supply chain simply can't. None of that should pressure a member who prefers traditional rennet for a particular style to switch. It's just useful context for why the questions we're fielding about sourcing keep getting more frequent rather than less.
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.