Most of our member spotlights land on someone whose whole working life is inside a cave or behind a counter. Elena Rodriguez is that person too — she's been head cheesemaker at her creamery for seven years, working mostly in sheep-milk styles — but this year she also joined the Standards Committee, which puts her on the other side of a process she used to only read about after the fact.
We asked her what changed. "I kept getting frustrated reading a finished standard and thinking, whoever wrote this has clearly never had to explain a moisture spec to a new hire at six in the morning," she told us. "So I figured I should be in the room instead of complaining about the room."
What a maker brings to a standards draft
The Standards Committee spends a lot of its year on language that sounds dry from the outside — moisture ranges, aging minimums, what counts as "farmstead" versus "artisan" on a label — but the wording has real consequences for a working cave. Rodriguez says her first few meetings were mostly listening, figuring out where the committee's drafting process already accounted for practical variation and where it didn't.
"There's a draft standard right now for a semi-soft category that has a moisture range I think is too narrow for anyone using raw sheep's milk in a humid climate," she said. "I'm not trying to blow it up. I want the range to survive contact with an actual make sheet." That's the kind of comment the committee says it wants more of from members who are still doing the work day to day, not just reviewing it from a distance.
The biggest adjustment, Rodriguez said, wasn't the substance — it was the pace. A standard that a member might expect to move in a season can take a full committee cycle or longer, with comment periods, redrafts, and coordination with the Food Safety Committee on anything that touches pathogen risk. She points to how long federal regulators took just to phase in a single new allergen labeling requirement as evidence this isn't unique to a small trade association — rulemaking that affects a working kitchen tends to move slowly everywhere, not just here. "I used to think slow meant nobody cared," she said. "Now I think slow means somebody's trying not to write a rule that breaks in April and gets fixed in October."
She's still making cheese five days a week; the committee work happens on top of it, not instead of it. Meetings run in the evening or over a lunch break she doesn't always get to take, and she says the tradeoff is worth it because she'd rather spend the hour shaping a standard than spend a later hour explaining to her staff why a standard doesn't make sense.
The Standards Committee has historically drawn membership from a mix of backgrounds — distributors, program directors, the occasional retired regulator — and makers who are still running a daily production schedule have been underrepresented on it for years, mostly because the time commitment is hard to justify against a make sheet that doesn't pause for meetings. Rodriguez's seat this cycle is part of a small but deliberate shift toward broader representation on committees that write rules the whole membership has to live under. A standard drafted entirely by people who don't currently run a cave or a vat tends to read cleanly on paper and then generate a wave of comment-period pushback once working cheesemakers actually try to apply it; drafts with a practicing maker in the room from the start tend to need fewer rounds of revision, not because the maker's opinion always wins, but because problems get caught earlier.
What she'd tell a member considering a committee seat
Rodriguez's advice for anyone weighing whether to apply for a committee opening: expect the first meeting or two to feel like you've walked into the middle of a long-running conversation, because you have. "Nobody explains the history to you," she said. "You have to ask, and most people are happy to explain it once you do." She also said the workload is more front-loaded than it looks — reading the draft language before a meeting takes longer than the meeting itself, especially the first few times through.
If you've got a comment on a draft standard currently open for member feedback, the Standards Committee page on the member portal has the current calendar and the address for written comments — Rodriguez says she reads every one that comes in before a meeting, whether or not it agrees with her.
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.