A new survey of more than two hundred artisan and specialty cheesemakers came out this week, and a couple of its findings are worth sitting with. First, makers report producing fewer distinct varieties than they did a few years back, after a long stretch of adding new styles every season. Second, the share of makers using any unpasteurized milk has dropped noticeably since the late 2010s. Read together, they look less like a retreat from ambition and more like a generation of small creameries choosing to do fewer things at a higher, more defensible standard.
We do not think that is a coincidence. Running a raw-milk line, or simply running more SKUs, means more variables to control and more documentation to keep current. A creamery that has been through a recall scare, a difficult audit, or just a season of chasing paperwork across too many products tends to arrive at the same conclusion on its own: narrower and better beats wide and shaky. It also does not hurt that tighter margins this season, with feed costs still running high against a softer milk check, leave less room to carry SKUs that were never pulling their weight.
Where the pressure actually shows up
The pressure point our members describe most often is not the recipe. It is the log. A Listeria environmental monitoring program that looked adequate for one aging room starts to strain the moment you add a second room, a new employee rotation, or a product line with a longer maturation window. The paperwork does not scale linearly with your cheese case — it scales with your surfaces, your traffic patterns, and how many hands touch a wheel between vat and label.
If your creamery has grown in the last two years — a second cave, a new hire running the aging schedule, a wider distribution footprint — this is a good season to have someone outside your operation look at your environmental monitoring plan before an inspector does. Our Listeria Control in Small Creameries course walks through swab site selection, corrective-action documentation, and how to write a plan that holds up when your team, not just your cheese, changes.
We would also push back gently on reading "making fewer types of cheese" as makers pulling in their horns. Several members who scaled back their line in the last year told us the opposite: cutting three marginal SKUs freed up cave space and labor to get one flagship wheel genuinely right, and that wheel is what is now winning them shelf space at retailers like Old Town Cut & Wrap Cheese Shop and Mongers' Row. A tighter line, done well, travels better than a long one done adequately.
What to do with this before your next audit
Pull your current environmental monitoring plan and check three things: does it reflect your cave layout as it exists today, not as it existed when you wrote the plan; does every corrective action have a date and a name attached, not just a checkbox; and does anyone besides you know where the plan lives. If any answer is no, that is this month's task, not next quarter's.
The Food Safety Committee is also collecting member questions ahead of its next session — if your creamery has a specific monitoring or documentation question, send it in and we will make sure it gets raised.
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.