Tuesday's webinar, Costing a Make 2020, drew close to three times the sign-ups we planned for when we scheduled it back in July. We'd guess that has less to do with the topic being new and more to do with the timing: a summer of a soft block market followed by feed costs that a lot of members are still trying to pin down for fall, on top of a federal margin-coverage report this week that gave a mixed read on where feed and milk prices actually stand relative to each other right now.
The session itself was the one we've run in some form for a few years — walking through a worksheet that turns a make sheet into a real per-pound cost, milk through packaging, including the pieces people usually forget like whey disposal, culture and rennet, and a share of the electricity bill for the cave. But the questions afterward told us more about where members are right now than the slides did.
What people actually asked
Two questions came up over and over. The first was about how to treat a spike in feed or trucking cost that you expect to be temporary — do you rebuild your price around it, or absorb it and wait it out? We don't have a universal answer, but the presenter's rule of thumb was useful: if you can't say with a straight face that the cost is coming back down within two make cycles, price as if it isn't going to. Waiting on a cost that doesn't come back down just means the loss compounds for another quarter.
The second question was about wholesale accounts that are slow to accept a price increase even when your input costs are documented and dated. There, the advice was blunter: bring the worksheet to the buyer, not just the new number. A price increase with a page of real cost behind it moves faster through a buyer's approval process than one that shows up as an unexplained line-item change on an invoice. A couple of attendees pushed back that even a documented increase gets stonewalled by an account that's squeezed on its own end this year, and the presenter didn't have a clean answer for that — sometimes the honest response is that a buyer relationship needs to change, not just the number on it.
We also had a good number of questions from members who are newer to formal costing altogether, several of whom mentioned they'd priced by instinct for years and only started tracking a real cost per pound this year, once the summer's swings made instinct an expensive way to run a small creamery.
If you missed it
The worksheet and a recording are available to members through the education portal — look for Costing a Make 2020 under this year's webinars. If you work through the worksheet and get stuck on where a shared cost like rent, a second employee, or refrigeration belongs, the Education Committee has office hours most weeks and will happily look at your numbers with you before you commit to a new price.
We're already collecting topics for the next round of free webinars this fall. If margin, labeling, or a specific credential question is what's keeping you up at night, tell us — that's usually where the next session comes from, and this one is a good example of why that works.
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.