Twenty years in, still choosing raw-milk cheese

Kate O'Leary has spent twenty years building cheese programs, and for most of that time raw-milk cheese has been the section of the case she cares most about. She's been a federation member for years, so we asked her what's kept her interested this long.

"Pasteurized cheese can be excellent, and most of what moves through a case is pasteurized for good reason," she told us. "But raw-milk cheese carries something you can't fully replicate once you've heated the milk — the microbial complexity of a specific farm, a specific season, a specific pasture. When it's made well, you taste a place. That's rare, and it's worth the extra care it takes to buy and sell responsibly."

What "responsibly" means in practice

That care shows up as a longer vetting process than most buyers use. Kate walks a producer's aging facility before she'll commit to a program, not just to taste the cheese but to see how the room is run — humidity control, how batches are separated, how a producer talks about their own failures. "Anyone can show you their best wheel," she said. "I want to see how they talk about the wheel that didn't work out. That tells you more about whether I trust their next one."

She's also candid that raw-milk cheese isn't a fit for every retail program. It requires a buyer who understands aging requirements and label rules well enough to explain them plainly to customers, and a case manager willing to track dates carefully rather than treating every wheel the same. Members newer to this side of the business, she said, should expect to spend real time with pricing and inventory discipline before adding a raw-milk line — our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course is a reasonable place to start, since a lot of the early mistakes in this category are more about turns and shrink than about the cheese itself.

Milk prices, and why the category still holds

Kate also had a word about market timing. Milk production has stayed roughly flat for months now, and margins for producers remain tight enough that she's watching supplier stability more closely than usual heading into spring. "A tight milk market doesn't change what I look for," she said, "but it does mean I'm asking harder questions about whether a small producer can weather a rough season before I build a program around them."

If you're a member building a cheese program of your own and want to talk through vetting a raw-milk producer, the Standards Committee keeps a running list of members willing to talk shop — Kate among them. She said she's glad to compare notes with anyone doing the same careful work she has for the last two decades.

Twenty years in, she still describes the work in almost the same terms she used when she started: taste everything, ask more questions than feel comfortable, and never let a good story about a producer substitute for walking their room yourself. It's not glamorous advice, but it's the kind that holds up across two decades of a category that keeps testing anyone who buys into it casually. For members earlier in that same process, her closing suggestion was simple — start with one producer, learn their season fully before adding a second, and resist the urge to build a whole raw-milk section before you've proven you can manage even one relationship well.

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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.