We promised a recap, so here it is. Counter Culture 2020 and Whey Management 2020 both ran this week, back to back on Tuesday and Wednesday, and between them drew one of the fuller turnouts we've had for a January pair of webinars. A few themes came up in each Q&A that are worth passing along even if you were in the room.
The retail session ran long on substitutions
Tuesday's crowd skewed toward counter staff and shop managers, and the conversation kept circling back to one problem: what to tell a customer when the cheese they came in for is out. The presenter's answer, more or less, was to prepare three go-to substitutions per popular item in advance rather than improvising at the counter, and to write the reasoning down somewhere the newest staff member can find it. "If you can explain why a washed-rind and a bloomy-rind aren't interchangeable, you've basically taught someone how to sell the whole case," was the line a few attendees flagged afterward as the one they wrote down.
Questions also went long on seasonal staffing — several members asked how to get a temporary holiday hire who's now staying on through the slow season up to speed quickly. The short version: pair them with a single mentor for the first two slow weeks rather than rotating them through the whole team, so the same person is answering the same follow-up questions instead of everyone re-explaining the basics from scratch. The presenter also pushed back gently on a common instinct to shrink the case during the slow months — a smaller, tighter selection with a clear point of view tends to move more product per square foot than a large case that's quietly been picked over and not fully replenished. A few attendees said they'd been doing the opposite, cutting orders across the board rather than cutting the slower-moving third and doubling down on what actually sells in January.
One question came up twice, in slightly different forms: how often should a wall of pre-cut, pre-wrapped product actually get pulled and checked against the sell-by date, versus trusting the rotation system on the shelf tag. The answer, unsatisfying but accurate, was "more often than you think you need to" — most rotation failures the presenter has diagnosed at member shops traced back to a tag system nobody had audited in months, not to staff skipping the process on purpose.
The whey session got specific fast
Wednesday's group was smaller and more technical, which tracks with what we expected going in. Most of the questions weren't about whether to do something with whey — they were about the actual economics: what a processor pays per hundredweight for raw whey pickup versus what an on-site separation setup costs to install and run. The presenter was candid that the math only tends to work at a certain volume, and that for smaller producers, a simple pickup arrangement with a processor is usually the better first step before considering any on-site recovery investment. A few members with larger operations stayed on the call well past the hour comparing notes on separation equipment vendors. That question is landing at an interesting moment: dry whey prices have been one of the few genuinely firm spots in an otherwise soft January dairy market, which is part of why the on-site-recovery math is starting to look different for members who ran the numbers a year or two ago and shelved the idea.
A handful of questions also covered the regulatory side — specifically, what permitting a small creamery needs before discharging any whey byproduct, treated or untreated, to a municipal system or applying it to land. The presenter's advice was blunt: check with your state agriculture or environmental agency before you change anything about your current disposal arrangement, because the rules vary enough by state that a method that's routine for one member can require a permit for another. Nobody on the call had a universal answer, and the presenter was upfront about that rather than guessing.
If either topic sounds relevant to your operation and you couldn't make the live sessions, both recordings are now posted in the education library, minus the live Q&A but with the full presentation intact. The Education Committee is already collecting suggestions for next winter's webinar slate, so if this week's pair left you wanting a deeper follow-up session on either topic, let us know what you'd want covered.
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.