Registration is still open for our first webinar of the new year: Cut & Wrap Efficiency, live on January 5. It's a short session, built around one specific question we hear from retail members every fall — why does the case look fuller in the walk-in than it does on the shelf.
The gap between the delivery and the case
A wheel arrives whole. By the time it's cut, wrapped, weighed, and priced, a shop has usually lost more of it than it should have — to trim that could have been portioned differently, to wrap that lets air in around a cut face, to a scale workflow that has a new hire double-handling the same wedge twice. None of this shows up as a single dramatic loss. It shows up as a margin that's a little thinner than the wholesale invoice says it should be, spread across every SKU in the case.
Dairy trade coverage this winter has been full of yield stories from the production side — cheesemakers investing in better process control to get more usable product out of the same vat of milk. Retail has its own version of that same problem, just later in the chain. A shop that loses a few extra ounces per wheel to a bad cut or a wasteful wrap is throwing away yield the cheesemaker already worked to protect. It is worth thinking about your counter the same way a plant thinks about its vat: every step either protects the product or costs you a little more of it.
The webinar walks through a cutting plan that gets more usable portions out of an irregular wheel, a wrap technique that actually slows moisture loss at a cut face instead of just sealing it, and a scale-and-label sequence that a seasonal hire can learn in one shift instead of three. None of it requires new equipment. Most of it is closer to a checklist than a technique. We will also cover the basics of matching wrap material to a cheese's moisture level, since one of the most common mistakes at a busy counter is using the same paper or film for a firm aged wheel and a fresh, high-moisture one.
Who this is for
If you run a counter, train the people who do, or you're the one who ends up recutting a wedge because the first cut wasn't clean, this is built for you. It also pairs well with anyone who took Counter Culture: Retailing earlier this year — this session goes deeper on the physical handling side that course only touches briefly.
We are also pointing this one at members who are hiring seasonal help for a spring market season and want a shorter, more repeatable training sequence than "watch me do it a few times." A clear cutting-and-wrapping checklist is one of the fastest ways to get a new hire producing clean, sellable portions without wasting a case's worth of trim while they learn.
The webinar is free to members and runs about 45 minutes with time for questions at the end. If you can't make it live, the recording goes up in the member portal within a few days, but the live Q&A is where most of the specific "what about this cheese" questions get answered, so if you have a shape or a rind that gives your case trouble, it's worth showing up in person. Register through the events calendar before spots fill.
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.