Members have been asking us for months about the status of the small-producer exemption question, and this week we have an actual answer worth passing along: the federal food-safety regulator has a comment window open on how the qualified-exemption threshold gets calculated for producers who sell through more than one channel. If you make cheese and sell some of it at a farmers market and some of it through a distributor, this is worth twenty minutes of your attention before the window closes.
The exemption exists for small producers whose direct sales make up more than half of their total revenue and whose average annual sales stay under a set dollar threshold. In plain terms, it means a farmstead selling mostly at the gate or the market stand doesn't have to build out a full written hazard-analysis and preventive-control plan the way a larger wholesale-focused operation does — though everyone still has to follow basic sanitation practice and recordkeeping requirements regardless of exemption status.
Why the threshold math keeps causing trouble
The trouble members keep raising with us is what counts as a "sale" for that calculation. A producer who sells wheels at full retail price through their own stand and sells the same wheels at a wholesale discount to a local shop doesn't have one clean number to work from — they have two different revenue figures depending on which channel moved the product, and the exemption math can come out differently depending on how those get counted. Several members told us this year that a change in their wholesale mix, not a change in their total production, was what pushed them over the exemption line without any warning.
The specific question in this round is whether direct-to-consumer sales made through a distributor-run farmers market booth — where the producer sets up the table themselves but the market handles some logistics — should count as "direct" for exemption purposes, or whether that arrangement should be treated more like wholesale. It sounds narrow. For a member whose whole exemption status turns on that one definition, it isn't.
What to do this week
Our Advocacy Committee has been tracking this specific ambiguity since a member testimony flagged it during an earlier comment cycle, and we're circulating draft language members can adapt rather than a form letter everyone signs identically. Regulators read individual, specific accounts of how a rule actually plays out in someone's business more carefully than they read a stack of identical form submissions — a detail from your own sales-channel mix does more work than a general statement of support or opposition.
If you sell through any arrangement that mixes direct and wholesale channels, even informally, read the comment prompt and consider submitting even a short account of how your own sales split works and what a change to the counting rule would mean for your exemption status. You don't need legal language or a formal brief — a clear, specific description of your situation is exactly what's useful here.
The comment window closes at the end of the month. Reach out to the Advocacy Committee if you want a second set of eyes on a draft before you submit it, or if you're not sure whether your sales arrangement is affected at all — that uncertainty is common enough that it's worth asking rather than guessing.
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.