Thirteen years on the road

One of our longer-tenured members is a regional sales director who has covered a multi-state wholesale territory for a mid-sized cheese distributor since well before several of our committees existed. He spends more time in a car and on a distributor's loading dock than in a make room, and he's watched the retail cheese case he sells into change more in the last few years than in the decade before that.

"Back when I started, a wholesale order was maybe six SKUs and everybody wanted the same six," he told us. "Now a single account wants a rotating case with something local in it, something aged, something nobody's carried before. That's a good problem. It's also a completely different sales conversation than the one I learned on."

What the account list looks like now

His territory used to be built almost entirely around a handful of large retail chains buying in volume. That business hasn't gone away, but the growth he's seeing now is coming from smaller specialty grocers and restaurant accounts willing to pay more for a cheese with a story attached — a named creamery, a specific herd, a style nobody two towns over is carrying. Industry reporting on specialty cheesemakers has tracked exactly this pattern nationally: steady multi-year growth concentrated in exactly the segment he's chasing, even as broader U.S. dairy export volume has run behind last year's pace through the first half of 2019 on the trade side.

That shift changed what he actually sells on a call. "I used to sell price and reliability. Now half my pitch is a story about a producer, and I have to actually know that story, not just repeat a line off a spec sheet." He's leaned on smaller creameries in the federation's membership for exactly that — members willing to let him bring a wheel and a two-minute background to a buyer meeting, in exchange for a distribution relationship they wouldn't otherwise have on their own.

The part that hasn't changed

What hasn't shifted, he said, is how much a bad delivery or an inconsistent batch can undo months of relationship-building with a buyer. "A specialty account gives you one bad delivery of goodwill before they start asking hard questions about everyone else on your list." That's part of why he pushes the small producers he works with toward the federation's food-safety and quality coursework even when they'd rather spend the time on the make itself — a buyer relationship built on story is still, underneath, a relationship that depends on consistency.

More than a decade in, he says the part of the job he didn't expect to still enjoy is the same part he started with: walking a buyer through a wheel they haven't tried yet. "The SKUs changed. The territory changed. Watching somebody taste something good for the first time hasn't."

If you're a small producer looking to get in front of wholesale buyers outside your immediate region, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a list of members on the distribution side open to exactly this kind of introduction.

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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.