Registration is open for our Brook Food Safety workshop, an in-person day in Seattle this May built for members running their own environmental monitoring and food safety plan without a dedicated compliance team behind them. If your plan hasn't had a real second look since it was written, or if it was written by someone who's since moved on, this is the session we'd point you toward.
The workshop is deliberately practical rather than theoretical. Rather than walking through the full text of federal food-safety rules, the day is organized around the documents a small producer actually needs to have ready: a written environmental monitoring program, a corrective-action log that shows you actually followed your own procedure when something came back positive, and a sanitation schedule that matches what happens on your floor rather than what a template says should happen. Instructors bring real (anonymized) plans from small creameries and walk the room through what an inspector tends to flag first.
Why an in-person day, specifically
We know a full day of travel is a bigger ask than a webinar, and we've heard from a few members wondering whether this one's worth it over a virtual session. The honest answer is that this particular topic benefits from the format. A meaningful chunk of the day is spent in small groups reviewing sample monitoring plans and finding the gaps in them together, which is harder to do well over video with people who don't already know each other. Several past attendees have told us the peer conversation during those sessions, comparing notes with another small operation working through the same rule, was worth as much as the material itself.
If you're the person at your creamery who inherited a food safety plan you didn't write, or you're building one from scratch for the first time, this is squarely the audience the day is designed for. It also tends to draw quality managers who've been doing the job for years and want a gut check on whether their plan has drifted from what they document.
Getting the most out of the day starts before you register:
- Bring your current written plan, even if it's incomplete or you suspect it's out of date. Instructors will use attendees' own materials as working examples during the small-group sessions, with names and specifics kept private.
- If you've had a corrective action in the last year, bring your documentation of it. Walking through a real corrective action with an instructor is one of the most requested parts of the day.
- Seats are limited to keep the small-group sessions workable, so if your team is sending more than one person, register early.
The workshop counts toward continuing education hours for the Food Safety & HACCP Certificate, and the Food Safety Committee will have office hours set up during lunch for anyone who wants to ask a question they'd rather not raise in the full group.
The one-person food safety team problem
A theme we keep hearing from small producers, and one the instructors build the day around, is that food safety at a small creamery is rarely anyone's only job. The person managing sanitation logs is often the same person doing herd checks, running the vat, or answering the phone for wholesale orders, and a written plan built for a facility with a dedicated quality department doesn't fit a team wearing five hats at once. The workshop spends time specifically on scaling a plan down to something one or two people can realistically maintain without cutting corners on what actually keeps product safe.
That's a different problem than simply learning the rule, and it's the part a lot of general FSMA training skips. Knowing what an environmental monitoring program requires on paper is one thing. Building a version of it that survives a busy production week, when the person responsible for it is also covering three other roles, is the harder and more useful skill, and it's the one this workshop is built to teach.
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.