We've spent the last two posts talking about how members are finding new ways to move product while food service stays closed. This one is about a snag several of you have hit once you tried to take that new channel across a state line: interstate cheese shipment is one of the older and more inconsistent corners of dairy regulation, and it was not written with a small creamery's weekend order form in mind.
The short version, for members who haven't run into it yet: some states require a specific license or registration before a producer can ship a perishable food product directly to a resident, on top of whatever license covers your home state. A few have rules about the labeling that has to travel with the package that differ from what's required for a wholesale case. None of this is new because of the pandemic. What's new is how many of our members are suddenly doing this kind of shipping for the first time, because the market has pushed them into it faster than the usual channel would have.
What we're hearing from members
A handful of you have told us you shipped an order out of state this spring without realizing a registration requirement applied, caught it after the fact, and are now working through how to get compliant retroactively. A few more have told us they've held off on out-of-state orders entirely because they couldn't get a clear answer on what was required in time to fill the order, and lost the sale to the delay. Neither outcome is good, and neither one is really about anyone doing something wrong. It's a patchwork of state rules that nobody built for this volume of direct shipment, hitting a wave of producers who need an answer this week, not next quarter.
Members with wholesale accounts and a distributor handling logistics have mostly been shielded from this. It's the members shipping direct to a home for the first time, filling the gap left by a canceled market or a closed restaurant account, who are running into it cold.
What the federation is doing
Our advocacy team has been compiling member reports on interstate cheese shipment requirements state by state, specifically where the rules are unclear, contradictory, or simply hard to find as a small producer trying to do this on your own. We're using that compilation to push for clearer, faster guidance from state agriculture departments during this stretch, and for a simplified path for small producers shipping in low volume directly to consumers rather than through a wholesale distributor.
If you've shipped out of state this spring, or tried to and hit a wall, we want to hear about it. Specifics help more than general frustration: which state, what was required, how long it took to find out, and whether the answer you got was actually clear. We'll fold what we hear into the record we're building, and we'll flag it if a member's experience points to a state where the rules are especially out of step with what a small shipment actually needs.
In the meantime, if you're planning to ship out of state for the first time, check with that state's department of agriculture before you take the order rather than after, even though that's slower than you'd like it to be right now. A delayed order is recoverable. A shipment that runs into a compliance problem after it's already left your dock is a much harder conversation, and it's the kind of conversation we'd rather help you avoid than help you clean up.
Reach out to the advocacy team directly with your state and your specifics, and watch this space for a summary once we have enough reports in hand to say something useful about the pattern rather than just the individual stories.
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.