Registration opened this week for the Rennet Alternatives webinar, set for mid-December. It's a narrower topic than most of our fall programming, but it came up often enough on committee calls this year that we built a session around it: what changes in your make when you switch coagulant sources, and why a substitution that works fine in a trial batch can behave differently once it's running through a full production week.
The timing isn't an accident. A few members have flagged tighter or costlier sourcing on certain imported coagulant products this year, and traditional rennet has followed general dairy-input pricing upward along with everything else. Microbial and fermentation-produced alternatives have gotten more consistent over the past several years, but "more consistent" isn't the same as "identical," and the webinar spends real time on the ways they aren't.
What the session actually covers
This isn't a sales pitch for one coagulant over another — we don't do those, and the instructor has made cheese with most of what's on the market. The session covers set time and curd firmness differences across common alternatives, how each behaves across a range of milk types and seasonal milk composition, and the flavor and texture effects some members report at extended aging times, which is where a coagulant choice can show up months after you've stopped thinking about it. There's also a straightforward cost-comparison framework, since "alternative" doesn't automatically mean "cheaper," and for some producers it isn't.
If you're purely traditional-rennet and have no plans to change, this might not be your hour. But several members who came to a similar session in past years told us the most useful part wasn't the coagulant comparison itself — it was the discussion of how to run a controlled trial on your own production line without risking a full batch. That's a skill that transfers regardless of what you're testing.
Part of what drives member interest is simply where each coagulant comes from. Traditional animal rennet is extracted from the stomach lining of young calves, and supply has always tracked the beef and veal industry rather than the cheese industry, which means cheesemakers are downstream of a market they don't otherwise touch. Fermentation-produced coagulants sidestep that dependency entirely — a microorganism is engineered to produce the same active enzyme and grown in a fermentation tank, which is part of why availability has been steadier for members who've already made the switch. Plant-derived coagulants, pulled from thistle or fig sap depending on the source, sit at yet another point on the spectrum, with their own set proteolysis behavior that some members chase deliberately for a specific rind character and others avoid for the same reason.
None of that makes one option correct. It makes the choice genuinely technical, which is exactly why we built a full session around it instead of a single paragraph in a newsletter. A member switching a hundred-wheel-a-week operation over to a new coagulant is making a decision that touches yield, set time, flavor development, and cost all at once, and getting one of those wrong because you didn't understand how the others move together is an expensive way to learn.
How to register
Registration is open now through the event page, and space is limited the way it is for all of our live webinars — we cap attendance so the question-and-answer portion stays useful rather than becoming a lecture. If you've been waffling on a coagulant switch for next year's production plan, this is a reasonable place to get real information before you commit to an order. And if you can't make the live session, recordings go out to registrants afterward, so signing up now still gets you the material even if the date itself doesn't work.
Questions about whether this webinar is the right fit for your operation can go to the Events Committee — they've fielded a few already from members trying to figure out if this is worth the hour given where their own sourcing stands. It usually is, but we'd rather you ask than 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.