The member who’s outlasted three cheddar cycles

Six years ago this month, a regional sales director at a mid-sized dairy supply company signed up for ICF membership on what he describes as "a slow Tuesday and a hunch." He's renewed every year since. We caught up with him this week because his anniversary date happens to fall right in the middle of ours, and because in a federation full of members chasing the newest wash-rind technique or the latest affinage cave build, he's spent twenty-two years selling the same thing everyone else treats as a commodity: cheddar.

"Nobody gets excited about cheddar at a trade show," he told us. "Everyone wants to talk about the blue in the back corner with the mushroom rind. But cheddar is what pays the light bill for most of the creameries I call on, and it's what most of their customers actually buy on a Tuesday." His territory covers a mix of long-established cooperatives and newer specialty operations, and he's watched the specialty side of the business grow steadily over his career without ever thinking cheddar was going anywhere. A market report released earlier this month put a number on part of what he's been seeing on the ground: the natural and specialty cheese market topped sixteen billion dollars at retail last year, and analysts expect it to keep growing for years to come — not by replacing cheddar and mozzarella, but by sitting alongside them on the same shelf.

What six years of membership actually gets used for

Asked what he's gotten out of ICF specifically, he didn't reach for a credential or a competition ribbon — he's not a cheesemaker, so those aren't his lane. What he pointed to instead was the newsletter's market-condition coverage and the annual conference's supplier floor, where he can compare notes with other people on the commercial side of the business rather than just the production side. "Half my job is knowing what's coming before my accounts ask me about it. This is one of the places I go to find that out early."

He's also candid that his engagement with committee work and coursework is low, and he's fine with that. Not every member needs to sit on the Standards Committee or work through a certification track for membership to earn its keep — for a member whose value is in market intelligence and relationships rather than hands-on craft, a well-run newsletter and a good conference agenda can be the whole return on investment. It's worth saying plainly: engagement looks different across a membership base this varied, and that's by design, not a gap to fix.

The long view

Twenty-two years in, he says the biggest change in the trade isn't any single technique or trend — it's that specialty cheese stopped being a niche inside grocery and became its own aisle, one that the traditional commodity cheeses now sit alongside rather than compete against for shelf space. His read squares with what the broader market research has been saying for a while: specialty and artisan segments keep growing faster than the category overall, even as the category as a whole stays healthy. He also points to a quieter shift on the cooperative side — a new federal margin-coverage program opened its enrollment window this month, and he's spent a fair amount of the past week fielding questions from cooperative accounts trying to decide whether to sign up. It's not glamorous work, but it's the kind of thing a good sales relationship is actually built on.

If you've been a member for a while and haven't told us your story, we'd genuinely like to hear it — reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee. Not every member spotlight needs a competition medal behind it. Some of the best ones are just somebody who kept showing up.

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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.