A federal emergency food-box program that helped move a lot of small creameries' cheese over the past year wound down this month, and one member wrote to us worried about what would replace it. What she told us next is worth passing along, because it's less a story about a program ending than about what a creamery builds while it's running.
She's a small-batch producer in the upper Midwest, member since before the pandemic, who had leaned on wholesale accounts almost entirely until last spring. When two of her three wholesale buyers paused orders, she signed on as a supplier to the box program mostly to keep the coolers moving. What she didn't expect was that the box program came with something wholesale never had: her name and a card in every box, in front of a household that had never heard of her creamery before.
Turning a subsidized box into her own list
By last fall she'd started collecting the addresses that mattered — the households that wrote back, asked when the next batch was coming, or ordered a second round on their own. She built a simple monthly mail-order box around six wheels and a jar of something seasonal, priced to cover shipping and actually pay for her time, and started mailing it to that list directly. No program, no subsidy, no third party in between her and the customer.
That's the box that's still shipping now that the federal program has ended. It's smaller than what the program moved at its peak — she's candid that it doesn't yet replace the wholesale volume she lost — but it's hers, and it's growing month over month instead of depending on a program's renewal. "I spent a year hoping someone would keep the box coming," she told us. "Then I realized I could just be the one who does that."
What she'd tell a member starting from zero
Her advice for anyone thinking about a similar move isn't romantic. Build the list from people who've already bought from you once, not cold outreach. Price the box to cover real shipping costs from day one — subsidized shipping teaches customers an expectation you'll have to walk back later. And don't wait for volume to justify the packaging investment; buy insulated liners for twelve boxes before you need three hundred, because the reordering lead time will bite you at the worst moment.
She also warns against copying the program's box contents too closely. The federal box was built around volume and shelf life, not margin, and a handful of members who tried to replicate it dollar-for-dollar found their new mail-order box barely broke even once real shipping and packaging costs were counted. Her version costs more per box than the program ever did, and she prices it that way on purpose — a mail-order customer buying directly from a creamery is paying for the relationship as much as the cheese, and she's stopped apologizing for that in her marketing copy.
The list itself took longer to build than the box did. She spent the winter answering nearly every email personally, including the ones that were just a thank-you note, because she'd noticed that customers who got a reply were far more likely to reorder than customers who got silence. That's not scalable forever, she admits, but it got her from a cold list of addresses to a group of people who actually open her monthly newsletter — which, for a one-person shipping operation, mattered more than any single sale.
If you're weighing a similar shift, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course covers packaging, shipping economics, and list-building in more detail than we can fit here, and it's a good next stop before you commit real money to it. The federation can't tell you whether direct mail order is the right model for your creamery. We can tell you it's worked for at least one member who started with nothing but a box the government was paying to ship, and who's still shipping it now that the government isn't.
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.