Market season is opening across most of the country this month, and for a lot of members that means loading a folding table and a cooler back into a van for the first Saturday since last fall. It's easy to treat the stand as the casual side of the business — the place you take the wheels that didn't quite fit the wholesale order, priced by feel. Members who've run a stand for a few seasons tend to describe it differently: as a channel with its own margin, its own customers, and its own failure modes, all of which reward planning as much as your wholesale accounts do.
That's the framing behind Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets, one of the federation's more practical courses and a good one to take before your first weekend out, not after your fifth.
The math nobody does at the table
The course opens with something a lot of members skip: pricing the stand separately from the wholesale sheet. Market pricing has to absorb the booth fee, the travel time, the staffing hour, and the cost of the wheels you don't sell and bring home again — none of which show up in a wholesale invoice. A price that works for a distributor account can quietly lose money at a table, especially once you count the Saturday morning that pulls someone off the production floor.
The course also covers the sampling question directly, because it's the one members argue about most. Generous sampling drives trial and repeat customers, but it also eats into product you paid to make. The instructors walk through a rough per-market sampling budget rather than a fixed rule, since a soft-ripened wheel and a hard aged one cost very different amounts to give away.
"I ran my stand for two seasons on gut feeling before I finally sat down and priced it like a real channel," one member who sells at a Saturday market in the Pacific Northwest told us. "Turned out my best-selling wedge was the one actually losing money once I counted the samples."
Building a customer, not just a sale
The second half is about what happens after someone buys a wedge. Market customers are the ones most likely to become repeat buyers, sign up for a mailing list, or ask where else they can find you — but only if there's something at the table that captures that interest. The course spends real time on the unglamorous parts: a legible sign, a simple way to collect an email address without slowing down the line, and a short, honest story about the cheese that doesn't require the maker to be standing there to tell it. That last part matters if you're sending a second staffer some weekends instead of going yourself.
Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets runs as a short online course you can complete before your first market weekend, with a workbook built around your own price list rather than a hypothetical one. If you're weighing a stand for the first time this season, or you've run one for years without ever sitting down to price it properly, this is the month to take it. Check the education calendar on the member portal for the next cohort opening, and bring your actual cost numbers — the course is more useful with real ones in front of you.
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.