Most years, a small farmstead producer plans a holiday-season aging schedule off gut instinct and last year's sales sheet. This year, one of our members in the upper Midwest told us she planned hers off neither. "Last year didn't happen the way this year is happening," she said. "I couldn't use it as a guide."
Back in August, with retail cheese sales already running well ahead of the prior year and her own online orders climbing faster than her farm-stand traffic, she made a call that felt risky at the time: she pulled a batch of wheels off her regular six-week rotation and set them aside for a longer age, betting that demand for something with more character would still be there by November. "I had a moment where I thought I was tying up cave space I'd need for the regular stuff," she told us. "But the online orders kept coming in for the aged wheels specifically, not the fresh ones. People stuck at home seemed to want something worth the wait."
Reading the cave instead of the calendar
She's not alone in facing that kind of guesswork this year. Members across the federation have told us the same thing in different words: this was the year the usual seasonal rhythm broke, and the ones who did best treated their cave and their order book as better information than the calendar. For her, that meant checking humidity and rind development against her notes daily rather than weekly, and being willing to pull a wheel early or leave it longer than planned if the cheese itself told her something different than her spreadsheet did.
It also meant leaning harder on data she'd normally treat as a formality. She started tracking which SKUs her online customers reordered versus which ones sold once and stopped, and used that — more than any trade publication — to decide which batches were worth the extra cave time this fall. "The reorder is the only number that's actually telling you the truth," she said. "Everything else is a guess dressed up as a plan."
What she'd tell a member starting this now
Asked what she'd say to a member just now deciding whether to hold cheese back for the holidays, she was direct: don't do it purely on hope. "Set aside what you can actually sell if you're wrong, not what you wish you could sell if you're right," she said. A longer age ties up both product and space, and a farmstead operation without much slack in either can't afford to guess big and miss.
If you're weighing a similar call for your own holiday inventory, our Cave Management coursework covers the humidity and airflow fundamentals behind decisions like hers, and the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a running list of members willing to compare notes on seasonal demand planning. As she put it: "None of us know exactly what November looks like this year. But the cave will tell you more than the calendar will, if you actually go down and look at it."
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.