Two items on the calendar this month are easy to let slide past if you're not looking for them, and both are worth the hour or the day.
Webinar: Export Paperwork, June 8
Our Export Paperwork webinar has become one of the quieter fixtures on the calendar — not glamorous, but consistently one of the better-attended virtual sessions we run, and for good reason. Members who've shipped a first pallet overseas tell us the same thing: the cheese was never the hard part. It was the export certificates, the certificate of origin, and the country-specific requirements that nearly derailed a first order.
Export certificates for dairy products generally need to be requested well ahead of a shipping date, and several destination markets require the certificate to be dated before the product actually leaves the country, which catches first-time exporters off guard more often than anything else on the checklist. This session walks through what a first-time exporter needs in the folder before a shipment leaves the dock, plus a running list of the paperwork mistakes that have cost members time — and occasionally a returned shipment — in past cycles.
It's free, virtual, and runs about an hour. If you've been quietly wondering whether that inquiry from an overseas buyer is worth pursuing, this is the cheapest way to find out what you'd be signing up for. Members who buy or sell across a quota-restricted category, which includes a good number of cheese types, will also want to hear the section on how quota timing can affect when a shipment should actually go out.
Workshop: Birch Competition Prep, June 21
The in-person side of the calendar is back in full swing this year, and the Birch Competition Prep workshop is a good example of why that matters. Unlike a webinar, this one puts your wheel in front of judges from our Awards & Competition Committee before you commit to an entry fee, so you get direct feedback on presentation, cut, and rind condition while there's still time to fix something.
Members who've done this workshop before entering our flagship competition tell us the single biggest value isn't the scoring — it's watching a judge handle and evaluate a wheel the way they will on the actual day, since that's rarely how a maker looks at their own product. A washed-rind maker who came through last year's session said she'd been slightly overproofing her rind for a full aging cycle without realizing it read as excessive to a judge's eye, something none of her regular customers had ever mentioned.
It's easy to treat export questions and competition prep as belonging to different kinds of members — the outward-facing sales side versus the craft side. In practice we hear from plenty of members doing both this time of year: entering a wheel in competition while also fielding a first export inquiry from a buyer who found them through last year's results. If that's you, June is a genuinely useful month to have both dates on the calendar rather than picking one.
Registration for the webinar is open now and stays open until the session starts, since it's virtual and unlimited. The workshop has a smaller cap, so if you're planning to bring a wheel, don't wait until the week before to register — reach out through the Events Committee page on the member portal to hold a spot.
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.