Every December we get a small wave of members asking, essentially, "what should I actually start in January." Not a webinar, not a one-off workshop — something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, that they can point to a year from now and say they finished. For a lot of counter staff and shop owners, that's the Certified Cheesemonger credential.
It's a fair question to ask why now. Resolutions made on December 31 have a well-earned reputation for not surviving February. But the Certified Cheesemonger pathway was built with virtual delivery in mind from the start, which turns out to matter more than the calendar. You don't need to book travel, clear a week of the shop schedule, or coordinate with three coworkers to cover your shifts. You log in, you do the module, you close the laptop. That's a lower bar to clear on a cold Tuesday in January than most professional development ever asks of retail staff.
What the credential actually covers
Certified Cheesemonger isn't a tasting badge. The bulk of it is the vocabulary and judgment a counter needs to do right by a customer and by the product: how to talk through a paste, a rind, and a finish without resorting to marketing language; how to store and rotate a case so nothing ages past its window; and enough production background — rennet type, wash schedule, affinage basics — that you can explain why a cheese tastes the way it does, not just that it does. Members who've completed it tell us the biggest shift isn't what they know, it's how much faster they can answer a customer's actual question instead of talking around it.
It also pairs naturally with two things a lot of counters are already doing. If your shop has been leaning into flavored and spiced cheeses — heat-forward and bold, globally-inspired flavor profiles were called out again this week as a trend to watch heading into 2022 — the sensory vocabulary from the credential gives you a faster, more specific way to describe those to a browsing customer. And if your case is doing more virtual tasting sessions or online orders than it did two years ago, the same descriptive skill carries over to a product description or a video call just as well as it does across a counter.
Starting without overcommitting
You don't have to decide in December whether you're doing the full track. The first module stands on its own and gives you a real sense of the pace before you're locked in. If you finish it and it's not the right fit, that's useful information too — the Sensory Evaluation Certificate is a narrower, faster option for members who want the tasting vocabulary without the full retail curriculum.
Either way, don't let "I'll start when things calm down" be the plan. Things rarely calm down in a way you notice in advance. Plenty of counters are heading into January short-staffed, with retail crews everywhere describing more callouts than usual this winter — which is exactly when a self-paced, log-in-when-you-can module beats a course that needs the whole team scheduled around it. Check the certification catalog in your member portal for the next cohort's open date, and if you're not sure which credential fits your role, the Education Committee will point you in the right direction — that's a five-minute message, not a project.
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.