A farmstead producer we spoke with this week runs a small crew — herself, two full-time employees, and whoever she can bring on seasonally — and she told us the single biggest lesson of her first few holiday seasons wasn't about cheese at all. It was about deciding, well before the order volume actually climbed, exactly who on her team was allowed to make a judgment call when something didn't fit the plan. "The recipe doesn't change in November. Everything around it does. If you haven't decided who can say 'stop' when a batch looks wrong, you find out the hard way, usually on your busiest day."
Specialty cheese demand tends to run higher through the last two months of the year, driven by gift boxes, holiday cheese boards, and retail accounts placing larger standing orders than they carry the rest of the year. For a small operation, that's not a gentle ramp — it's closer to a step change, and it lands on the same crew that's been running a normal-sized operation since spring.
Why she starts in September, not November
Her holiday planning begins two months before the first oversized order actually ships. She maps expected volume against her current aging inventory, figures out where the gap is, and — this is the part she says most new producers skip — decides which of her regular batches can absorb a schedule shift if something runs long. "You can't just decide in the moment that Tuesday's batch waits until Wednesday. Someone has to already know that's an acceptable call, or you end up making a rushed decision under pressure instead of a planned one."
The staffing side matters just as much as the production side. She brings on one seasonal hire most years, and the biggest mistake she made early on was treating that hire's training the same way she'd treat a full-season new employee — spread out over weeks that the holiday calendar doesn't actually give you. Now she front-loads training onto specific, narrow tasks a seasonal hire can genuinely own within a few days, rather than trying to get them competent at everything a full-time cheesemaker eventually learns.
What she'd tell a member doing this for the first time
Her advice for anyone facing their first real holiday volume: write down, now, which decisions during a rush are yours alone to make and which ones a trusted employee can make without waiting for you. If that boundary isn't clear before the season starts, it gets drawn under pressure instead, usually at the worst possible moment. She also flagged something worth repeating — a holiday-season crunch is exactly when it's tempting to cut the parts of your routine that feel optional, like a full cleaning pass between batches when you're behind. Those are usually the first things worth protecting, not cutting, because a mistake made in a rush costs far more time to fix than it would have taken to prevent.
If your own operation is heading into its first real holiday surge, or you're still refining how you hand off decisions to a seasonal crew, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting exactly these kinds of practical notes from members this fall. Reach out if you want to compare notes before your own order volume turns the corner.
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.