Most of our member spotlights this spring have been about moving a cheese business somewhere new — online, curbside, off premises entirely. This one is about the opposite problem: what it takes to reopen a physical table at a farmers' market that's been closed, or running skeleton operations, for two months. We spoke with a small farmstead producer who's back on her local market's vendor list starting this week, and asked her to walk us through what actually changed.
Her market reopened with a new layout that gives every vendor booth roughly twice the footprint it used to have, with ten-foot gaps between stands instead of the old shoulder-to-shoulder arrangement. That sounds simple until you're the one figuring out where your cutting table, your cooler, your register, and your line of customers all fit inside a space that's suddenly a different shape than the one you planned your setup around for the last three seasons.
What's gone, and what's new
Sampling is gone, at least for now, and she told us it's the change customers ask about the most. "People are used to trying a wedge before they buy a wedge," she said. "Explaining that we can't do that right now, every single transaction, gets old — but I understand why, and most people do too once you explain it." In its place, she's started pre-cutting and pre-wrapping smaller portions so first-time customers can try something without a shared knife or an open wheel sitting on the table.
Gloves come off and go on constantly — a fresh pair for handling cheese, a different pair or bare hands for money, a wipe-down of the point-of-sale terminal between customers where the rules require it. Hand sanitizer sits at both ends of her booth. None of this is complicated individually; all of it together adds real time to every transaction, which means a market day that used to move a certain volume of customers through her line now moves noticeably fewer, even with the same hours on the clock.
The part that surprised her
What she didn't expect was how much the rules vary by jurisdiction, sometimes across markets in the same region. One nearby market requires vendors to wear masks at all times; hers requires it only when within six feet of a customer. One allows a single sample knife wiped between uses if wrapped samples aren't practical; hers doesn't allow sampling at all, full stop. She's now the one keeping track of which rule applies where, market to market, because nobody else is going to do it for her.
That patchwork is exactly the kind of thing our Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting reports on this spring, and it's worth a note if your own market's rules don't match what a nearby one is doing — we'd like to hear about it, and it may be useful to members navigating the same maze. In the meantime, her advice to anyone reopening a table this month is blunt: plan for a slower service line, print more signage than you think you need, and expect at least one customer per market day who's never heard of any of these rules and needs the short version, patiently, more than once.
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.