Every January a handful of members ask us the same question in different words: is it time to raise our prices, and if so, by how much? We don't answer that question directly, because we don't know your cost structure and wouldn't presume to. What we can do is teach you how to answer it yourself, which is the whole premise behind Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese, opening a new cohort this month.
Why this course exists now
Last year scrambled a lot of members' sales channels. A wholesale account that used to take half your output might have gone quiet in the spring and never fully come back. A farmers' market booth might now be doing the volume your retail counter used to do. Whatever your mix looks like right now, it's probably not the mix your last price sheet was built around — and a price sheet built for a channel mix you no longer have is a price sheet that's quietly losing you money.
The course walks through building an actual cost sheet: milk cost per pound of finished cheese, yield loss through aging, labor time per batch, packaging, and a defensible margin on top, channel by channel. It's not theoretical. Members leave with a working spreadsheet they can update every quarter instead of a set of slides they forget by February.
What's different about a virtual cohort
We moved this course online last spring out of necessity, and enough members told us the format actually worked better for a numbers-heavy topic that we've kept it that way. You can pause the recording to actually build your cost sheet instead of copying it down fast in a hotel conference room. The instructor still holds a live office hour each week for the harder questions — usually the ones about pricing a wholesale account differently than a retail case, or what to do when a distributor wants a volume discount you haven't costed out.
A quieter benefit: a fair number of members in the previous cohort said the real value was hearing how other small creameries were handling the same channel-mix problem, which doesn't happen when you're pricing in isolation. That kind of comparison is harder to get anywhere else, and it's part of why this course has stayed full even as some of our other virtual offerings have leveled off.
If you're planning a spring price change, now is roughly the right window to start the math — enough time to build the sheet, test it against a few real invoices, and have new numbers ready before your busy season hits. Waiting until the busy season is exactly the pattern this course is meant to break.
Enrollment for the current cohort is open through the middle of the month. If you've already got a cost sheet you're happy with, the course still has value as a gut check — bring it, and the instructor will help you stress-test it against the numbers other members are seeing this quarter. Reach out to the Education Committee if you have questions about which cohort fits your schedule.
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.