Our Workshop: Curd Food Safety ran two days in Querétaro at the end of last month, and while the room skewed heavily toward members with an active make floor, we've had enough questions from people who couldn't travel that it's worth a plain recap rather than letting the content live only in one city's memory.
The workshop was built around a single, narrow problem: what actually happens to pathogens during the curd stage, before a wheel ever sees a cave. That's a deliberately tighter scope than a general food-safety course. Curd handling sits at a point in the process where temperature, moisture, and time are all doing work at once, and small mistakes there are harder to catch later than a labeling error or a temperature log gap. The instructors spent the first day almost entirely on environmental monitoring — where to swab, how often, and what a member should actually do with a positive result rather than just recording one and moving on.
The part that generated the most questions
The second day covered corrective action planning, and it's where the room got the most animated. Several attendees pushed back on a common assumption: that a single positive environmental swab means an automatic hold on product. The instructors were careful here — a positive result requires an investigation and a documented response, but what that response looks like depends on where the positive was found and what it was. A swab from a floor drain triggers a different protocol than one from a food-contact surface, and conflating the two either creates unnecessary product holds or, worse, normalizes ignoring results that need one. Members left with a decision tree they can adapt to their own cave layout rather than a one-size answer.
One attendee, a mid-sized farmstead operator making her first trip to an ICF workshop outside her home region, told our team afterward that the value wasn't any single technique — it was watching how a room full of otherwise competitive cheesemakers talked through their own near-misses without anyone pretending they'd never had one. That's not something we can put in a syllabus, but it's a real part of why in-person workshops keep filling even in a year when a lot of other trade-group programming has moved online.
We've fielded a few questions about the choice of city. Querétaro wasn't picked for novelty — a growing share of our membership now sources curd or ages product across the US-Mexico border, and curd-stage handling doesn't respect that line even when paperwork does. Running the workshop there let us bring in members whose plants sit on both sides of a shipment relationship, which changed the room's questions in a useful way: less "what does the rule say" and more "whose responsibility is the swab result once the curd crosses a border." We don't have a clean answer to that yet, and neither did the instructors, but naming the gap out loud was worth the trip on its own.
It's also worth saying plainly that this workshop landed in a quieter week for the broader dairy market — cheese cold-storage stocks came in under expectations in the most recent federal reporting, a reminder that the industry background against which any single workshop happens keeps moving whether or not the room in front of you is talking about it.
If you missed it
We don't currently offer a recorded version of this particular workshop, since a meaningful part of the content is the hands-on swab-mapping exercise. If curd-stage food safety is a gap in your program, the closest standing course is Listeria Control in Small Creameries, which covers adjacent ground and runs multiple cohorts a year. Contact the Education Committee if you want to know when the next Curd Food Safety workshop is scheduled — we expect to run it again, though not necessarily in the same city.
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.