A federal comment period on how small-producer exemptions apply to dairy processing closes next month, and the Food Safety Committee wants members to weigh in before it does. This is one of those rulemaking windows that sounds procedural until you're the farmstead creamery it actually touches.
The exemption framework was built for small operations, but "small" is defined by a sales threshold that hasn't kept pace with what a farmstead's costs look like this winter. Feed costs have eased some from where they were a couple of years ago, but nonfeed operating costs — utilities, packaging, labor — have kept climbing, and economists tracking milk production costs describe a margin picture that stays tight even when the headline feed number improves. A creamery can cross the exemption's sales line on paper without having gotten any bigger in the ways that matter: more staff, more square footage, more risk to actually manage. Cross that line and you inherit the full recordkeeping and hazard-analysis burden of a much larger operation, on the same kitchen-table crew.
Why this matters more this year than most
We've heard from a handful of members already that this is the year the math stopped working in their favor. A farmstead running two people through calving season and a wholesale account doesn't have slack to absorb a new compliance layer, even one that's ultimately about keeping cheese safe. Independent research into how small and mid-sized food processors absorb the cost of preventive-control requirements has found what you'd expect: the burden scales down much more slowly than the business does. One recent study put first-year compliance costs for a small or mid-sized food business at roughly $22,000, plus ongoing annual costs after that — money a hundred-person plant absorbs without much notice and a ten-person creamery has to find somewhere in an already-thin budget. The fixed cost is nearly the same either way; it just lands on a much smaller revenue base.
That's not an argument against food safety. It's an argument for a threshold that reflects actual production capacity rather than a dollar figure that inflation quietly moved out from under the farmsteads it was meant to cover.
The Food Safety Committee's draft comment asks the regulator to index the exemption threshold to a cost-of-production measure instead of a flat sales number, and to give operations a grace period rather than an abrupt cutoff the moment they cross it. Neither change undoes the underlying rule. Both would keep a bad year from turning into a compliance cliff for an operation that's otherwise making safe cheese and doing the paperwork it can afford.
We've also asked for the exemption review to happen on a fixed schedule going forward, rather than waiting for advocacy to force another look. A threshold that's revisited every few years against current production costs is a lot less likely to strand small operations the way this one has.
What we're asking members to do
If you run a small creamery, or you buy from several, your specific numbers are the most useful thing you can put in a comment — what your annual sales actually are, what a new compliance program would cost you to stand up, how many hands you have to run it. General support for the committee's position helps, but a comment with your own figures in it is what a regulator actually weighs when the file is a stack of similar-sounding letters.
The comment period closes at the end of February. If you want the committee's draft language as a starting point, or you'd rather they submit your comment as part of a joint filing instead of on your own letterhead, reach out through your member portal and the Food Safety Committee will get you what you need before the deadline.
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.