The first full week back after the holidays is a quiet one on the calendar by design — we don't like stacking programming on top of everyone's January inventory count. Next week is different. We've got two webinars running Tuesday and Wednesday, and they're aimed at different parts of your operation, so it's worth knowing which one is yours before you sign up for both out of habit.
Tuesday: Counter Culture 2020
This one's for the retail and monger side of the membership. Counter Culture 2020 is built around a question we hear every January: how do you keep a case interesting in the slowest retail month of the year, right after the busiest one? The session covers seasonal case rotation, how to talk a customer through a substitution when a supplier runs short, and a segment on training seasonal counter staff who are now three weeks past the holiday rush and possibly a little burned out on cheese talk. If you run a counter, this is an hour that pays for itself the first time you use it.
Wednesday: Whey Management 2020
The second session is squarely for the production side. With dry whey pricing showing some of the only firmness in an otherwise soft January market, this is a good moment to look hard at whatever's currently going down your drain. Whey Management 2020 walks through the practical options for a small-to-mid producer — selling to a processor, on-site ricotta or whey-protein production, and the food-safety and permitting considerations that come with each. It's not going to turn every member into a whey-utilization operation overnight, but for anyone who's been meaning to run the numbers on it, this removes most of the excuse for not starting.
Both sessions are virtual, run about an hour with time for questions, and are free to current members — check your member portal for the registration link and add either or both to your calendar now, since seats have been filling faster than the January date might suggest. If you can't make the live session, recordings go up in the education library within a few business days, though the live Q&A is where most members tell us the real value is.
If you're weighing whether either topic fits your business closely enough to justify the hour, a rule of thumb: if you've had a customer ask you to explain a substitution in the last month, Tuesday's session is for you. If you've priced out a whey buyer's offer in the last year and shrugged it off, Wednesday's is worth an hour of second-guessing that decision. Plenty of members will find a reason to attend both, and that's fine too — a counter clerk who understands what happens to the whey after the curd is cut tends to explain a wheel's price a little better, and a cheesemaker who's spent an hour hearing how the case gets sold tends to make cuts that move faster through it.
One scheduling note for members juggling both a shop floor and a make room: the two sessions don't overlap, so it's possible to send different staff to each, or to sit in on both yourself if the week allows it. We picked back-to-back days on purpose, right after the quietest week of the year, so that the answer to "when would I even find the time" is, for once, this week.
We'll have a short recap of both in next week's post for anyone who misses them live.
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.