It's been two weeks since the ICF Annual Conference closed in Sacramento, long enough that the badge is off the lanyard hook and the notebook is back on the desk, but short enough that we're still hearing from members about which session actually changed something back home. If you were there, this is the week we'd love to hear from you too, reply to any of our emails or find your regional rep at the next local event.
The sessions that came up most in the feedback we've collected weren't the biggest ones. A pricing workshop that ran opposite a headline judging panel got more "I used this the week I got home" notes than almost anything else on the schedule. That tracks with what our Events Committee has seen in past years: the room with forty people trading actual numbers tends to outperform the room with four hundred people watching a stage, at least for members who came looking for something to change on Monday morning.
What didn't make the main stage
Conference hallways carry their own conversations, and this year a fair amount of that hallway talk was about input costs, feed, energy, and the price of a used vat, rather than anything on the printed agenda. That tracks with the broader supply picture the trade press has been reporting this summer: national milk production is running well ahead of last year as the dairy herd keeps expanding, which keeps commodity prices soft and puts real pressure on anyone selling into that end of the market. Members closer to the commodity side, and especially our smaller farmstead operations, had a harder conversation to have in the hallway than the ones selling specialty and artisan wheels, margin pressure that a national supply number doesn't fully capture at the scale of forty cows and one cave.
If that was your conversation in the hallway too, you're not the only one who left the ballroom to have it. We also heard from a few members who skipped this year's conference entirely, budget, timing, a cave that couldn't be left unattended for four days, and asked what they missed. Session recordings for the ones we're able to share will go up for members in the coming weeks; watch for the notice in your inbox. In the meantime, our regional workshops carry a smaller-scale version of the same content closer to home for members who can't make the annual trip.
What's next on the calendar
The next standing event on our books is a free, virtual recall readiness webinar on August 21, a good one to put on the calendar now rather than the week of. Food safety was already a live topic at more than one Sacramento session, and a study published this summer on how different food types affect listeria's survival found that the pathogen holds up notably well in cheese specifically, compared with some other categories, which is one more reason a caves-and-counters audience should treat this webinar as more than a routine notice. Beyond that, our Workshop: Cave Farm Shop Retail runs in September for members building out a retail counter alongside their production side, and registration details for both are up on the events page.
If Sacramento left you with a question you didn't get answered in the room, our committee chairs are reachable through the member directory, and that's usually the fastest way to get a real answer rather than waiting for next year's agenda to circle back to it. A good conference should leave you with more questions than it answers; the follow-up is where the actual value usually shows up.
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.