If you sell retail, you've probably already noticed this year's version of a pattern that's been building for a while: customers aren't asking for one wedge anymore, they're asking for a board. Shareable formats — cutting boards, gift crates, "bring something for six people" requests — have become one of the steadier growth stories in specialty cheese, and members running counters and farm stands have told us this fall's early orders are leaning harder into that than last year's did.
Industry forecasters have been predicting this for a while, and the retail data has mostly backed them up: shareable formats are expected to keep climbing on menus and in cases well past this year. Even the federal dairy promotion board that funds category-wide marketing efforts has spent this year reworking how it's apportioned, a reminder that the "board" trend is big enough now to shape how promotion dollars get argued over, not just how a single shop merchandises its case. For members, that's less a forecast to admire and more a planning problem to solve, because a board customer buys differently than a single-wedge customer does.
Why a board order is a different order
A member buying one wedge usually knows what they want. A member — or their customer — building a board for six people is often improvising, and they lean on whoever's behind the counter to fill in the gaps: something soft, something firm, something unusual enough to be a conversation piece, and at least one thing they already recognize so the board doesn't feel like a dare. That's a merchandising problem as much as a cheese-knowledge one, and it rewards a counter that can talk through a board in under two minutes without making the customer feel rushed.
It also changes how you should be thinking about inventory. A board order pulls from more of your case at once than a single sale does, and it pulls unevenly — firm aged styles and something spreadable move together in a way your ordering habits might not be built around yet. A few members have told us they've started keeping a standing "board kit" of four or five paired items ready behind the counter specifically so they're not improvising every order from scratch during a Saturday rush.
The online piece nobody should skip
The other half of this trend is that a growing share of these orders are happening online before the customer ever walks in, or instead of them walking in at all. If your shop doesn't have a simple way for a customer to order a pre-built board or crate from your website, you're leaving a real and growing category of sales on the table — not to a competitor down the street necessarily, but to whichever shop makes it easiest to order without a phone call.
You don't need a full e-commerce buildout to capture this. A short list of two or three fixed board sizes, priced simply, with a pickup window, covers most of the demand we're hearing about from members who've tried it. The goal isn't matching a big retailer's website — it's making sure a customer with a Thursday dinner party doesn't give up on you because they couldn't figure out how to order in five minutes on their phone.
If you want to talk through board merchandising or a simple online ordering setup with other members who've already built one, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps an informal list of members willing to compare notes — a genuinely useful thing to borrow before the holiday season makes this same question a lot more urgent.
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.