We talked this month with a farmstead member in the upper Midwest — a two-person operation, herself and one part-time hire — who spent February doing something a lot of members are quietly considering: she cut her lineup from nine cheeses down to four. Not the four that sold the most. The four that made money once she counted the aging-room time, the extra label runs, and the hours spent explaining a cheese nobody had heard of yet.
"I kept the ones people already trust," she told us. "The interesting ones are fun to make, but fun doesn't pay the propane bill in March." She's not alone — it's the kind of call several members have made this quarter as feed costs have eased but nearly everything else hasn't, and a smaller lineup run well is starting to beat a bigger one run thin.
She'd been circling the decision for most of the winter without making it. What pushed her over the line, she said, was doing the milk-price math the same week she was restocking her aging room and realizing the two numbers didn't agree with each other — the wholesale price she was watching every month said things were "heading in the right direction," but her own per-wheel cost on the slower-moving cheeses hadn't budged. A market recovering in the aggregate doesn't recover evenly across every product on your shelf, and she'd been assuming it would.
The math behind the cut
She walked us through what changed her mind, and it's a useful checklist for anyone eyeing their own lineup this spring:
- Cave space is a cost, not a given. Every extra variety sitting on a shelf for eight weeks is eight weeks that shelf isn't earning for something else.
- A short line sells easier at a counter. Buyers she'd been pitching a nine-cheese sheet to were skipping straight to the two they already recognized. Four cheeses, told well, moved faster than nine cheeses told fast.
- Retiring a cheese isn't failing at it. She's freezing two recipes rather than discontinuing them outright — the idea being that if the market or her capacity shifts again, the notes are there.
What she'd tell a member weighing the same call
Her advice wasn't about the cheese at all. "Look at your last twelve months of orders before you look at your recipe book. The recipe book will always tell you to keep everything — it's proud of everything. The order sheet won't lie to you the same way."
The hardest part, she admitted, wasn't the math — it was telling two long-standing wholesale accounts that two of their favorites were going on hiatus. Both took it better than she expected. "One of them told me she'd rather have four cheeses she could always get than nine where half were usually out of stock anyway," she said. That's a detail worth sitting with: a smaller lineup that's reliably in stock can read as more professional to a buyer than a long one that runs out.
She's also being careful not to call this permanent. The two recipes she's freezing rather than discontinuing stay documented — batch notes, culture ratios, aging schedules — so that if her capacity grows or the market shifts again, she's not starting from scratch. "Cutting a cheese doesn't have to mean losing the knowledge behind it," she told us. "It just means this isn't the year for it."
If you're doing a similar gut-check on your own lineup this spring, the Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of per-SKU accounting, and the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a short list of members open to a one-on-one conversation about what they cut and why. Sometimes the most useful thing another member can tell you is what they stopped making.
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.