For six years, running a cheese program meant standing behind a case with a tasting knife, telling customers what to buy by reading their face. Last spring, one member's shop lost that entirely, almost overnight, and she had to figure out how to sell a wedge of something nobody could smell first.
What she landed on, a year later, is less improvised than it sounds. Every cheese in her case now carries a short written note — where it's from, how it's made, what to put next to it — that started as a stopgap for a locked front door and turned into something regulars ask for by name. "People wanted the story even when they could stand right in front of the case," she told us. "I just didn't know that until I had to write it down."
What actually changed
The shift wasn't just moving a counter conversation onto a product page. She rebuilt her ordering cadence around what those written notes revealed: certain cheeses sold better once customers understood the make, not just the flavor. A washed-rind she'd struggled to move for years became a steady seller once the note explained why the smell was the point. Industry reporting from this stretch of the pandemic backs up what she saw at the register — retail cheese sales climbed sharply through 2020 even as foodservice demand collapsed, with shoppers gravitating either to familiar, affordable staples or to the kind of higher-end specialty pieces that reward a little context.
That split is exactly what her notes were built for. The everyday wheels get a line or two; the pieces she wants a customer to trade up to get the fuller story, the producer, the season, the reason it costs more. She says that distinction did more for her per-ticket average than any single new cheese she brought in last year.
She's also been more deliberate about who writes the notes. Two staff members split the work now, which means the shop's voice has widened past her own palate — something she says she resisted at first and now thinks made the program better. A newer hire's plainer, less jargon-heavy style turned out to convert better with first-time customers than her own more technical notes did.
A skill worth building on purpose
What she describes — writing about a cheese's origin and process in a way that sells without overselling, and keeping that voice consistent across more than one staff member — is close to a discipline in its own right, and it's one a lot of retail and creamery members are still working out on the fly. If your shop or creamery is still writing case copy from scratch every week with no shared approach across staff, it's worth treating that as a gap rather than a habit.
If you've built a system worth sharing — a case-note template, a way of training new staff to write about cheese, anything that's made the virtual-first version of your business better rather than just workable — the Membership & Outreach Committee is always looking for members willing to talk through what worked. A year into this, the good ideas are coming from members, not from us, and we'd rather pass them along than guess at them ourselves.
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.