A letter-writing campaign we launched this fall on interstate cheese shipment keeps turning up the same underlying problem: a lot of members, and a lot of the customers trying to order from them, don't actually know what's allowed. Raw milk itself can't cross state lines for sale. A cheese made from raw milk and aged sixty days or more can. That distinction is decades old, well established, and still, by our count, misunderstood by a meaningful share of our own membership.
Where the confusion costs members real sales
We've heard from more than one member this fall who turned down an out-of-state wholesale inquiry because they assumed any raw-milk product was categorically blocked from interstate sale, when in fact their aged wheels were entirely eligible to ship. We've also heard the opposite mistake: a member who shipped a fresher raw-milk cheese out of state without realizing it fell short of the aging threshold, and only found out when a distributor's own compliance check flagged it. Neither error is really about food safety — it's about a rule that's simple in principle and easy to get wrong in practice, especially for a small creamery juggling multiple product lines with different age profiles.
Our letter campaign this fall is asking regulators for something narrow and specific: clearer public guidance that states the sixty-day threshold plainly, in language written for a small producer rather than a compliance attorney, and a simple way for a member to confirm a specific batch's eligibility before committing to an interstate order. We're not asking for the underlying rule to change. We're asking that a member be able to answer "can I ship this" without guessing.
The confusion isn't unique to our members, either. A handful of states allow unpasteurized dairy sales within their own borders under their own rules, which is a separate question from whether a product can cross a state line, and we've found that the two get conflated constantly in casual conversation among producers and customers alike. A member operating in one of those states told us a customer assumed that because raw milk was legal to buy locally, any raw-milk product from anywhere was automatically fine to have shipped in — which isn't how either the state or federal rules actually work.
What to check before you say yes to an out-of-state order
If you make raw-milk cheese and you're weighing an interstate order, the sixty-day clock starts at the point the cheese is formed, not when it's sold, and it needs to be documented — a make date on your records that you can point to if a distributor or inspector asks. Members who ship interstate regularly told us the habit that saves the most trouble is keeping that make-date documentation as automatic as a temperature log, rather than something you reconstruct after the fact when an order comes in.
If you're not sure whether a specific batch clears the threshold, or you want your name added to the letter campaign before we send our next round, the Food Safety Committee can walk through your specific product line, and the Membership & Outreach Committee is collecting member examples of orders lost or nearly lost to this exact confusion. The more concrete examples we can point to, the stronger the case for clearer guidance.
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.