During the American Cheese Society’s virtual conference, Thursday, Emily Harbison, technical specialist with Dairy Connection, and Dave Potter, vice president of Dairy Connection, shared their perspective on how COVID-19 impacted the specialty cheese industry. Dairy Connection, Inc. is an ingredient supplier to specialty, farmstead, and small-to-midsize cheese and fermented-milk manufacturers nationwide.
In the fall of 2020, Dairy Connection set up a data collection infrastructure to monitor how their customers were doing and what challenges or successes they were encountering. From this data, a few themes began to emerge, including:
• Purposeful pauses. A lot of cheesemakers took a break from processing milk, said Harbison. Some sought out other revenue streams, while some just grazed their animals and attempted to get their bearings.
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