A major hurricane crossed Florida's west coast this week, and by the time it made landfall Wednesday evening, one of our members had already spent a full day without power. Her aging cave, tucked behind a small retail counter she's run for six years, lost utility power on rolling outages a day before the storm itself arrived — a detail that turned out to matter more than the storm's eye ever did to her inventory.
We're not naming her shop, at her request, but she agreed to walk us through the 24 hours, because she thinks other members in storm corridors could use the checklist she wishes she'd had sooner.
The first four hours are the ones that count
Her cave runs a narrow humidity band for a bloomy-rind program she's spent two years building a following around. The first thing she did when the power blinked was pull a portable generator she'd bought used the year before — not for the refrigeration compressor, which draws more than it can handle, but for a single small humidifier and a battery-powered thermometer logger she keeps clipped inside the door. "I can lose two degrees of cool for a day," she told us. "I can't lose the humidity log, because I won't know what actually happened to the wheels until I can taste them."
That's the piece she wants other members to hear: prioritize what you can't reconstruct after the fact, not what feels most urgent in the moment. A thermometer log tells you, days later, whether a batch is worth selling or worth writing off. Guessing doesn't, and by the time you can get back into a dark shop to check by hand, the window for saving a batch may already have closed.
She also kept a written log of every hour the power was out, alongside the ambient temperature readings from her battery-powered unit. That log did double duty: it let her make a calm, specific call about which batches to write off instead of guessing under pressure, and it gave her something concrete to hand her insurance adjuster the following week, rather than a vague description of "a couple of days without power."
What she'd change next time
She lost about a third of a batch of a young washed-rind wheel to temperature swing, and she's philosophical about it — feed and packaging costs already ate more of her margin this year than she'd like, and one soft batch isn't what keeps her up at night. What does keep her up is that she didn't have a mutual-aid arrangement with a neighboring creamery before this storm, the kind where two shops with different power situations agree in advance to shelter each other's most temperature-sensitive stock. She's setting one up now, with a shop about forty minutes inland that never lost power at all.
She's also rethinking her generator plan for next season — not a bigger unit, but a second small one dedicated purely to the humidifier and logger circuit, so a single point of failure doesn't take out both at once. It's a modest fix, and one she wishes she'd made after last year's near-miss instead of this year's actual loss.
If you're a member anywhere a named storm could reach you this fall, that's the actionable piece: a one-page mutual-aid agreement with another cave owner, signed before you need it, costs nothing and takes twenty minutes to draft. Our Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a members-only regional contact list for exactly this kind of arrangement — reach out if you'd like an introduction to a nearby member before the next system forms.
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.