Most members heading into a holiday selling season have done it before, which means the planning has a rhythm to it. One member we spoke with this week doesn't have that rhythm yet. She and her husband run a small dairy farm that's shipped fluid milk wholesale for close to fifteen years, and this spring they added a cheese program — a few aged and fresh styles, sold mostly direct off the farm and through two nearby shops. This is their first November as cheesemakers, not just dairy farmers, and their first holiday season with a case to fill.
"Everyone kept telling us November and December would be different from the rest of the year, and I believed them, but I didn't actually know what that meant until the orders started coming in," she told us. "We built our production calendar around a steady pace all year. Nobody warned me how much of the year's cheese sales would land in about six weeks."
What caught her off guard
The volume wasn't the only surprise. Aging math was the harder one. A holiday order calendar means working backward from a delivery date to figure out when a wheel needed to go into the cave, and for a producer used to selling fluid milk the same week it's shipped, that kind of forward planning was new. "With milk, you make what you make and it's gone in days. With a six-month cheddar, I had to have already decided in June what I'd be selling this December. I hadn't, not really, and I'm short a few wheels because of it."
She's also spent more of the fall on staffing than she expected. Two of her regular farmhands agreed to work counter shifts through December, and training them to talk about cheese with a customer — not just hand over a bag of it — turned out to take longer than she budgeted for. "I know the difference between our aged and fresh styles without thinking about it. Explaining it to a customer who's never had either, in the thirty seconds you get at a farm stand table, is a completely different skill, and it's one I had to teach on the fly."
What she'd tell a member doing this next year
Her advice for anyone adding a cheese program to an existing farm operation was blunt: start the holiday planning absurdly early, further ahead than instinct suggests, because the cave doesn't care how new your business is. "A wheel needs the months it needs. You can't rush affinage because your website's been live for two weeks and the orders caught you off guard." She's already keeping a running list of what sold out first this year, the same kind of list longtime retail members tell us they wish they'd started years before they finally did.
Despite the scramble, she said the first season has been worth it — enough that she's already blocking cave space for next year's holiday wheels earlier than she thought she'd need to. If you're a member adding cheese to an existing dairy operation and want to talk through a first-season production calendar before you're in the middle of one, the Membership & Outreach Committee can connect you with members who've done exactly that transition.
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.