Another round of food-industry trade shows announced this month that they're going digital-only this fall, citing rising case counts. If that news landed in your inbox alongside a sigh, we understand it. But we'd also gently push back on the instinct to treat virtual programming as the consolation prize. For a lot of our members, it's been the format that actually worked.
We built this year's calendar assuming some in-person events would get pulled at the last minute, which is part of why we kept two members-only webinars on the books for this week and next, rather than folding them into a single fall conference bet.
This week: herd health, and a room full of people who already know your problem
Webinar: Herd Health & Milk Quality runs Wednesday, August 18. It's aimed at the intersection every cheesemaker eventually has to live in — what's happening in the barn shows up in the vat whether you planned for it or not. The session covers somatic cell count trends, how seasonal heat stress shows up in milk composition, and what a creamery can reasonably ask a dairy partner to track versus what belongs on your own intake log. We ran an earlier session on this topic back in the spring and the follow-up questions kept coming, which is the real reason it's back on the calendar rather than a one-and-done.
Webinar: Raw Milk Rules follows on August 24. If you make with raw milk, or you're weighing whether to start, this is the session to clear an hour for. We'll walk through how aging-period requirements are currently enforced, what documentation actually satisfies an inspector versus what just satisfies you, and where the federation's Food Safety Committee is pushing for clearer language at the state level. Bring your specific situation — the Q&A block at the end tends to be the most useful twenty minutes of the hour.
Why we're not apologizing for the format
A conference room does things a webinar can't — the hallway conversation, the chance to smell someone's blue before you taste it. We miss that too. But a webinar does something a conference can't manage on its own: it shows up on a Wednesday afternoon between a make and a delivery run, no travel budget required, no missed shift on the floor. Attendance on our virtual sessions has held up all year, and the mix of who's in the room has actually gotten wider — small creameries that could never justify a flight are logging in every time.
If a session gets recorded, we'll post it to the members' resource library within a week, so a missed Wednesday isn't a missed opportunity. But live sessions still get the fuller Q&A, so if either topic is live for your creamery right now, put it on the calendar rather than waiting for the recording.
Registration for both webinars is open through the events page. If you're only picking one, let your current pressure point decide — herd health if you're chasing a quality issue, raw milk rules if you're navigating compliance. And if neither quite fits, keep an eye on next month's schedule; we're not slowing down the virtual slate just because a few in-person shows are coming back.
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.