One of our members has run the cheese program at a mid-sized specialty retailer for most of the last five years. If you've ever stood in front of a case with forty wheels behind glass and no idea where to start, you've met a version of the person she trains her staff to be. We caught up with her this week about what's actually changed at the counter since she started.
"People assume the job is knowing a lot about cheese," she told us. "Half of it is that. The other half is figuring out what someone actually wants when they say 'something not too stinky' and mean four completely different things by it." She still takes phone calls from regulars asking what to pair with a Tuesday dinner, and she says that's on purpose — the program grew mostly on word of mouth, not on marketing spend she never had.
What five years changed, and what didn't
The biggest shift, in her telling, isn't the cheese itself so much as the customer standing in front of it. Specialty and artisan cheese has kept growing as a category through the back half of the last decade, and her case has grown with it — more domestic makers on the shelf than when she started, fewer imports carrying the whole program by themselves. That tracks with what industry watchers have been documenting broadly heading into this year: a steadily expanding base of small and mid-sized producers competing for counter space that used to go almost automatically to a handful of familiar names.
What hasn't changed, she says, is how much the job still runs on memory. She keeps a running mental list of who's allergic to what, whose kid just started eating solid food and needs something mild, who's hosting a dinner party the third Saturday of every month like clockwork. None of that lives in a spreadsheet. "You could probably build a system for it," she said, "but by the time you'd built it, you'd have just learned everyone's names instead."
She's also blunt about the parts of the job that got harder, not easier. Sourcing has become more competitive as more retailers chase the same small-batch makers, and margins on the most in-demand wheels have gotten tighter even as volume has grown. Consolidation is even starting to show up on the charcuterie side of the case, with a couple of producers combining forces this winter — a reminder that the growth she's riding is also attracting bigger money than it used to. Her approach has been to build direct relationships with a rotating set of smaller producers rather than compete purely on price with the accounts everyone already knows about — a slower way to build a program, but one she says has held up better than chasing whatever's trending that quarter.
If there's a single piece of advice she'd pass to a newer program director, it's to resist the urge to carry everything. "The case that tries to be everything to everyone usually ends up being memorable to no one," she said. "Pick your lane, know it cold, and let the regulars tell their friends."
We're always glad to feature members whose work happens mostly out of view of committee meetings and conference stages — the day-to-day judgment calls that keep a cheese program running are their own kind of expertise, and they're exactly the sort of thing this space exists to recognize. If you know a member whose counter, cave, or spreadsheet deserves a closer look, tell us about it.
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.