One of our members runs a small foothill creamery in California, the kind of operation where the owner is also the cheesemaker, the affineur, and most weeks the one answering the phone. When this past weekend's planned wildfire-prevention power shutoff hit her county, she didn't lose a single wheel. That's not luck. It's the direct result of a one-page plan she wrote back in the spring, taped inside the cave door, and hoped she'd never need to use.
The plan that was already sitting there
The plan itself is unglamorous: a rented generator sized to the cave's compressor load, a written order of what gets powered first if the generator can't run everything at once, and a paper log sheet clipped next to the thermometer for exactly this situation. "I wrote it after a regular equipment failure, not because I was thinking about wildfire shutoffs specifically," she told us. "Turns out the plan doesn't care why the power's out. It just needed to exist."
When the shutoff notice came through with about a day's warning, she didn't spend that day scrambling for a generator rental — she'd already identified a supplier and kept the number on hand from the spring incident. The cave held its temperature range for the first several hours on thermal mass alone, and the generator picked up the load well before humidity control became a real concern. Two days later, when power came back, her log sheet showed a clean, documented record of every reading in between.
What almost went differently
She's quick to point out this wasn't a flawless run. The generator she'd lined up in the spring had since been rented out to someone else for an earlier scare, and she spent an anxious afternoon calling around before finding a backup source — a gap she's since closed by confirming a standing rental agreement instead of a casual understanding. "The plan was right. My assumption that the same generator would always be sitting there waiting for me was the part that was wrong," she said. It's a small correction, but it's the kind of detail that only shows up once you've actually run the plan under real conditions instead of just writing it down.
Her creamery isn't unusual in the risk it faces — plenty of our California members sit in the same utility footprint, and plenty more deal with their own version of the same problem when a storm or an equipment failure does the same thing a shutoff did to her. What's unusual is that she'd already done the work before she needed it. If you've been meaning to write your own cold-chain contingency plan and haven't gotten past a mental checklist, her advice is the simplest kind: write it down, confirm your backup power source actually exists rather than assuming it, and keep a paper log within reach of the thermometer. The Food Safety Committee is glad to look over a draft if you want a second set of eyes before you need it for real.
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.