LESSON 3: RECEIVING & STORING YOUR CHEESE

Save time and money, plus get longer shelf life on your product by following these helpful strategies.

Receiving

Temp the product as it arrives to your dock or in store department cooler if placed there by your receiver. You will be able to know immediately if there were temperature issues with it while it was being transported to you. Ideally cheese should arrive between 33°F and 41°F, not frozen, but not too warm. Excessive temperature fluctuation can greatly affect cheese quality.

If you need to stage the cheese outside of the storage cooler due to space limitations, ensure that the staging area is air conditioned and not subject to warm outdoor temperatures and limit the amount of time cheese stays in the staging area.

If possible, begin inspection once the product is in the storage cooler.

Use triage method when inspecting cheese to identify what needs immediate care or is ready for immediate sale.

Remember that natural cheese is an agricultural product and it will rarely be perfect. This type of shrink is reasonable, and the expectation is that you will factor that type of loss in when setting your retail prices.

Things to note in inspections – that cheeses are intact, within acceptable temperature ranges, showing acceptable sell-by dates and stage of ripeness, if there is any excessive mold that shouldn’t be there, and any packaging breakage, excessive wetness or dryness. Don’t forget that with several cheeses, mold is natural, perfectly acceptable and is supposed to be there.

Acceptable conditions for cheese – small amounts of mold growth on the surface of a hard cheese, small cracks or dents in the rind of a hard cheese, broken seal in cryovac without excessive mold growth on the cheese surface, and a slightly tacky or moist surface*.

Unacceptable conditions for cheese – product arriving past its published sell-by date, excessive ballooning of cryovac, excessive mold growth caused by a broken seal in cryovac, frozen cheese, cheese received warm (>60 degrees), or excessively wet or dry.

Storage 

The most important aspect of cheese storage is rotation – newer product (or less ripe) on the bottom and older product (riper) on the top.
The exception to this rule: With surface-ripened cheeses, make sure the riper products go out first. Always check and inspect your product and then rotate based on what you see.

Ensure the effectiveness of your rotation system by dating everything directly on the box using a grease pen or marker.

The best rule of thumb of cheese storage is to flip the cheese upon arrival and keep cheese in its box until it is ready to be merchandised for sale.

*Upon inspection of a cheese that has a moist, tacky surface, allow the cheese to remain unwrapped for a short period of time to dry out the surface just enough for it to be wrapped again and put back into its box.

Upon inspection of a cheese that has a dry, flaky surface, wrap the box in plastic to keep the cheese from drying out any further (but do not wrap the cheese itself – plastic suffocates whole wheels of natural rind cheeses and promotes off flavors).