Not every member spotlight starts with a big change. This one is about a small farmstead creamery in the upper Midwest that spent the better part of last year quietly rebuilding almost everything it used to do in person, and is starting the new year deciding which of those changes are staying for good.
Before last spring, the operation's two owners split duties the old way: one on the make floor, one driving a route of five wholesale accounts and a Saturday farmers' market table. By last summer, three of those five accounts had gone quiet and the farmers' market had capped attendance. They told us the hardest part wasn't losing the volume — it was losing the conversations that used to tell them how their cheese was actually landing with customers.
What replaced the route
They didn't have a marketing budget or a web developer, so they built what they could: a short weekly email to their mailing list, a standing Saturday pickup window at the farm, and a habit of asking every single pickup customer one direct question about the last wheel they'd bought. It's not sophisticated. It is, by their account, more direct feedback than the wholesale accounts ever gave them.
They also enrolled in Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets last fall, mostly to see if there was a name for what they'd been improvising. There was — and it gave them a few things they hadn't thought of, including a simple way to track which pickup customers were repeat versus one-time, which turned out to matter more than they expected for deciding how much to make each week.
One thing that surprised them: the weekly email, which they'd started almost apologetically, ended up doing more to steady their production planning than the wholesale route ever did. A wholesale account might place a big order one month and go quiet the next with no warning attached. Their mailing list, by contrast, gave them a rough weekly signal — how many people opened the email, how many replied asking about a specific wheel — that let them adjust the following week's make sheet instead of guessing. It's not a sophisticated forecasting tool. It's closer to a running conversation with forty or fifty households who tell them, plainly, what they want more of.
What they're keeping and what they're not
Going into this year, they're keeping the pickup window and the weekly email regardless of what happens with the wholesale accounts that eventually come back. What they're not keeping: the assumption that a route built five years ago is still the right route. "We built that route around what worked once," is roughly how they put it to us. "We hadn't checked if it still did."
They're not alone. We've heard versions of this same story from creameries who spent last year improvising a direct relationship with customers because the usual channels weren't reliable, and who are now finding that direct relationship is worth more than they expected — not a stopgap, just a better way to sell cheese.
If your own operation is sorting through which pandemic-era changes are worth keeping, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course opens a new cohort this quarter, and the Membership & Outreach Committee is always glad to hear how your own numbers are shaking out. We'll keep sharing these stories as more of you send them in.
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.