Twenty years in cheese, most of them teaching food safety

Gwen Whitfield has been a federation member since 2014, and if you've sat through one of our food-safety sessions in the last few years, there's a decent chance you've heard her voice, even if you didn't know the name. She's the principal at Whitfield Food Safety Training, a small practice she started after roughly two decades of hands-on cheesemaking, and she still describes traditional cheddar as the style she thinks about the most.

We caught up with her this month to ask a question we get from a lot of members who are weighing a similar move: how do you go from making the cheese to teaching other people how to make it safely?

From the vat to the classroom

"I didn't plan it," Whitfield told us. "I was doing HACCP paperwork for my own plant because nobody else was going to, and I got decent at it. Then a neighboring creamery asked if I'd look at theirs. Then it was three creameries. At some point you have to admit that's a business, not a favor."

What she says surprised her most about the transition wasn't the material — she'd lived the material for years — it was how differently people absorb it depending on how it's delivered. "A checklist doesn't change anyone's behavior on the floor. What changes behavior is somebody standing next to the vat saying 'walk me through what you actually do here,' and then finding the one step where the real risk is hiding. That's true whether you're a two-person farmstead or a thirty-person plant."

Traditional cheddar remains her point of reference for almost everything she teaches, in part because the process gives so many natural checkpoints — cheddaring, milling, pressing — where a monitoring step fits without disrupting the make. "If I can teach someone to build a habit into a cheddar make, they can usually translate that habit to whatever else they're making. The style is almost a teaching tool by accident."

What she'd tell a member starting out

Asked what she wishes more members understood before their first inspection, Whitfield didn't hesitate: "Your records are the inspection. If your monitoring log is thin, vague, or missing a week, that's what gets discussed, regardless of how clean your plant actually is. Write it down like someone who has never met you is going to read it, because eventually someone who has never met you is going to read it."

Whitfield is quick to point out that the underlying craft hasn't changed nearly as much as the paperwork around it. Milk is still milk, cultures still need the right temperature window, and a good cheddar still rewards patience at the mill. What's shifted, in her view, is how much documentation is expected to prove that the craft was done carefully — a shift she's mostly positive about, with reservations.

"Twenty years ago, a lot of food safety was reputation and instinct. You trusted a maker because you'd tasted their cheese for a decade and nothing bad had ever happened. That's not nothing, but it doesn't scale, and it doesn't help a new inspector who's never met you. The paperwork exists so that trust doesn't have to be earned one relationship at a time." At the same time, she's candid that the volume of required record-keeping can overwhelm a one- or two-person operation if nobody helps them prioritize which records actually reduce risk and which just create busywork. That's the gap her practice tries to close — not adding more forms, but making sure the forms that exist are the ones that matter.

She's also watched membership itself change. When she joined the federation in 2014, she says food-safety sessions were sparsely attended and treated as a compliance chore. "Now people show up early and stay for questions. Some of that is regulatory pressure, sure, but some of it is that more members are running facilities big enough that a single bad inspection actually threatens the business. The stakes changed, so the attention changed with it."

She's a regular presence at our food-safety sessions and has said she'll keep showing up as long as members keep asking questions — which, based on the room every time she's presented, doesn't look like it's slowing down. Her advice for a member just starting to formalize their own program is to resist the urge to copy someone else's paperwork wholesale. "Borrow the structure, not the content. Your hazards are specific to your plant, your milk source, and your process. A monitoring log copied from a friend's creamery two states over will have gaps exactly where your real risks are, because it was written for someone else's risks."

If you want to bring a specific plant question to her, reach out through your regional contact and we'll pass it along.

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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.