When a member who runs a small farmstead creamery in the upper Midwest first put together a video tasting class last year, she'll tell you it was never meant to be a business. It was a way to keep some cash moving through a wholesale account list that had mostly stopped calling, and a way to give her regular customers something to do with the wheels she couldn't move through her usual channels. She built six boxes, mailed them to whoever signed up, and hosted the tasting herself over video on a Tuesday night. She figured she'd do it once or twice and go back to normal when normal came back.
Normal came back, mostly. The classes didn't go anywhere.
What made it stick
Part of it is simple economics: a ticketed class with a mailed box sells at a margin that a wholesale wedge doesn't come close to, and she's not competing with a distributor's price on her own product. But the part she talks about more is who actually shows up. A handful of her regulars from the very first class are still in the rotation eighteen months later, and she's picked up new customers from well outside her old delivery radius — people who'd never have found the farm stand but will happily log into a Tuesday tasting from three states away. A farmers-market stand has a geographic ceiling. A video call doesn't.
The class itself has gotten more structured than that first improvised night. She now builds a simple flight — a young wheel, something washed-rind, something aged past a year — and walks through what's different about each one, borrowing some of the vocabulary from the sensory training she took through the federation two cohorts ago. She says having a shared way to describe what people are tasting made the classes noticeably better almost immediately, not because her customers needed the technical terms, but because it gave her a structure to teach from instead of just narrating "isn't that good?" for forty-five minutes.
What she'd tell a member thinking about starting one
Her advice for anyone considering the same thing is to treat the shipping and the box as the actual product design problem, not an afterthought. A tasting flight that arrives warm, crushed, or with the wrong piece missing undoes whatever you say on the call. She spent more time figuring out packaging than she did planning her talking points, and it shows in how few complaints she's had. She also keeps class sizes small — a dozen households, not fifty — because she wants to be able to answer questions live, not just perform at a screen.
She doesn't think of the video classes as a replacement for wholesale or her farm stand; she thinks of them as a third leg that didn't exist before and isn't going away now that the other two are steadier. If you're weighing whether a format born out of necessity is worth keeping once it isn't necessary anymore, her answer is simple: ask whether it made your product better to talk about, not just easier to sell during a hard stretch. For her, it did both.
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.