Most spotlights in this space feature a member whose story fits neatly into a paragraph. This one didn't have a clean shape until about June, because the member we're writing about spent March through May not knowing which parts of her business would still exist by summer.
She runs a small farmstead operation — a handful of employees, a herd she milks herself most mornings, and until this spring, a wholesale book built around a half-dozen restaurant accounts and two regional distributors. When dining rooms closed in March, those accounts didn't trim their orders, they stopped placing them, and by April her wholesale volume was down by more than half. "I had wheels aging for orders that weren't coming," she told us. "At some point you have to stop waiting and start asking who else might want them."
What she rebuilt
What she rebuilt wasn't a replacement for wholesale — it was a different business running alongside the wreckage of the old one. She started with a folding table at the end of her driveway two mornings a week, then added a short online order form so customers could reserve wheels ahead of pickup instead of hoping something was left. By June she'd added a small mailing list, mostly former restaurant customers who recognized her name and wanted to keep buying the cheese even without the dining room attached to it.
None of it replaced the wholesale volume dollar for dollar, and she's careful not to overstate the recovery. But it's real revenue, it pays at a better margin than her old distributor accounts did, and — this is the part she comes back to most — it's revenue she can see and adjust in real time instead of waiting on a purchase order that may or may not show up. Industry-wide, retail cheese sales have climbed sharply this year as home cooking replaced restaurant meals, and members across our list who had any direct-to-consumer channel at all going into this year report the same pattern: not a full replacement for wholesale, but a real cushion.
What she'd tell another member starting from scratch this summer is not to wait for a perfect setup. Her first two months of driveway sales ran on a cash box and a chalk sign. The online form, the mailing list, even a proper scale for the table — all of that came after the sales proved the demand was there, not before.
She's still hoping her old wholesale accounts come back, at least partly, once dining rooms stabilize. In the meantime, she's not waiting on that either. If you're a small producer weighing whether a direct channel is worth building this year, our Membership & Outreach Committee can put you in touch with members who've been through exactly this pivot over the past several months — including, if you ask, the one in this post.
The part that surprised her
What she didn't expect was how much of the driveway business turned into repeat customers rather than one-off curiosity purchases. She'd assumed the early crowd was mostly neighbors trying something new because their usual grocery run felt riskier than normal, and that the novelty would wear off within a few weeks. Instead, roughly the same faces kept showing up, and by June a good third of her Saturday sales were coming from people who'd pre-ordered online rather than walked up on the day.
That repeat pattern is what convinced her to keep the online form running past the summer rather than treating it as a temporary fix. Building it cost her a Sunday afternoon and cost nothing in cash, which she says is the main reason she was willing to try it before she had any evidence it would work. Her advice to other members isn't to copy her setup exactly — a folding table won't suit every farm's layout, and not every operation has road frontage to sell from — but to treat the first version of a direct channel as disposable. Hers changed twice between March and July, and she expects it'll change again before the year is out.
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.