Better late than never!
I posted my first couple of days in Quebec and then wasn't able to get back online to finish it until now. I do most of my reading on my phone and that just isn't really well suited to blogging. So now that I have time to sit and type I'm going to just download info here so I don't forget everything I learned.
So, back to Friday, August 5th!
Our first session was the Town Hall Meeting where they discussed what the Society has been doing for the past year and where they see it going. The floor was opened up for comments from the membership. I piped up and stated that I'd like to see them reach out to beginning farmstead producers to help them make the transition from amateur to professional. Most of these producers don't have the funds to participate in the American Cheese Society, it is very expensive to join. However, all the learnings are already there or are being developed to help them go from small/non-selling producer to a professional producer working from a certified facility. We were limited to 2 minutes so I'm not entirely sure I got my point fully across.
First seminar of the day was The Cheese Chain: HAACP and traceability from farm to fork. This was one of the most important sessions I attended because it discussed the new Food Safety Modernization Act. This is what the gov't is going to be requiring for all producers who sell over a certain volume a year. Cheese, however, falls into a high-risk category that requires ALL producers who sell to the public to meet new standards and requirements. These include:
A written HAACP plan (it's easier to write than you think!)
Maintaining training records for all of your employees
Maintaining environment monitoring records (i.e. temperature logs for all of your hot and
cold food holding areas)
Allergen control program in place (i.e. document how you are going to keep allergens
separated and have employees trained on it. Keep training records.)
Mandatory Good Manufacturing Program (GMP)
As a producer you need to know where your products are coming from and where they are going to. It's easy to track a product once it's in your facility and after it leaves, but incoming raw materials from your suppliers will be the challenge.
There is a certain amount of time allowed to register your production facility after the Act goes into effect, there is a required renewal/re-registration every 2 years thereafter.
There followed Lunch.
The second session of the day didn't really have anything of great interest to me and I hadn't done a tasting yet so Kirk and I went to the Fermented Foods tasting. This was cheese, bread, and beer and was moderated by a bread guy, a beer guy, and a cheese guy. Now, these are notoriously hard to do. You want to select your products to highlight the item you are trying to sell. Here, in this case, it was the cheese but the beer guy was trying to sell the beer and the bread guy was trying to sell the bread. Plus, the beer guy was going through all that puffed up hoo-ha that wine and beer guys teach to "properly" taste the wine and beer. And he was really, really slow. The people at our table eventually ended up doing our own pairings that came out tasting much better. On top of it all something triggered a migraine which fully bloomed the next day.
I ended up going back to the hotel room and trying to get ahead of the pain when I could. Wasn't successful but forced myself to go to the awards reception that evening.
Saturday dawned and I was in serious pain but I didn't want to miss anything, the sessions that day were the most interesting to me.
First session was Milk Composition and was a crash course in microbiology 101. It was absolutely fascinating. I'm typing up my notes from this separately so I can add it to my cheesemaking notes binders. I can really see how this can help me to develop my milking herd depending on the type of cheese I want to make, and help me use the milk to the best advantage. Made me want to go out and buy a chemistry set and enroll in the professor's summer course.
Second session saw Kirk in the Growing Mold Gracefully seminar with Sister Noella. I attended a similar session 6 or 7 years ago that was also given by her and just fell in love with images of molds and yeasts as seen through an electron microscope. So, as I've already essentially gone to that I attended the second half of my previous session, Microbial Activity of Milk. The main lesson to take home from this was that milk is a great growing medium if you're a bug. That's why it's in the high risk category for FSMA. The professor explained why pH is so important as well as how best to select a starter culture for the type of cheese you are working to create. He commented more than once that many of the cheeses he judged for the competition had evidence of contamination primarily because the cheesemaker wasn't contolling the environment and the conditions the milk was under to prevent gas forming bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, or slow the growth of psychrotrophic bacteria. He then showed us what cheese mites look like under a microscope. I now want to rearrange the storage shelves in the coolers and clean all the racks down. Fascinating but yucko!
Lunch break.
The final session was probably the most important of the entire conference. The Society brought in a guy from the FDA as well as his Canadian counterpart. They were there to inform us the direction the gov't regulators are going in regards to cheesemaking and raw milk vs. pasteurized milk. All of their discussion points made a great deal of sense and are the direction I was hoping they would go. It sounds like the regulations for raw milk will be adjusted to be based upon the type of cheese being made but then also backed up by data. They are developing a comprehensive risk profile for different classes of cheese but it is a very complex problem. He stated that the FDA will NOT be requiring a longer 60 waiting/aging period for raw milk cheeses. The HACCP plan would bring traceability into it and record keeping will be essential. The Society's stand is that we should self regulate before the gov't can get into the act and restrict our practices, much like other organisations do - most notably the NRA and the practice of architecture.
The FDA representative said that the ideal way to approach this problem is to establish a performance standard and allow the industry flexibility to meet that standard. They desire to apply cheesemaking specifics, maintain hygenic/safe processes, and overestimate pathogens in how you respond to handling the product.
I was impressed by how well behaved all the people in the session were, it was a real boon to have these two speakers there and this particular topic can become quite heated very quickly.
I ended up leaving the session about 10 minutes before it was over as my head was killing me and was affecting my stomach. Made it back to the hotel and tossed my cookies. Spent the rest of the night trying to deal with the pain. Unfortunately I missed the end of conference Gala. They had all 1600+ cheeses that had been entered in the competition out on display for tasting but I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the noise, the crowd, or the food.
The next morning we left for home. Boo. Wish we had more time to spend up there, it was quite a lovely place.
So, back to Friday, August 5th!
Our first session was the Town Hall Meeting where they discussed what the Society has been doing for the past year and where they see it going. The floor was opened up for comments from the membership. I piped up and stated that I'd like to see them reach out to beginning farmstead producers to help them make the transition from amateur to professional. Most of these producers don't have the funds to participate in the American Cheese Society, it is very expensive to join. However, all the learnings are already there or are being developed to help them go from small/non-selling producer to a professional producer working from a certified facility. We were limited to 2 minutes so I'm not entirely sure I got my point fully across.
First seminar of the day was The Cheese Chain: HAACP and traceability from farm to fork. This was one of the most important sessions I attended because it discussed the new Food Safety Modernization Act. This is what the gov't is going to be requiring for all producers who sell over a certain volume a year. Cheese, however, falls into a high-risk category that requires ALL producers who sell to the public to meet new standards and requirements. These include:
A written HAACP plan (it's easier to write than you think!)
Maintaining training records for all of your employees
Maintaining environment monitoring records (i.e. temperature logs for all of your hot and
cold food holding areas)
Allergen control program in place (i.e. document how you are going to keep allergens
separated and have employees trained on it. Keep training records.)
Mandatory Good Manufacturing Program (GMP)
As a producer you need to know where your products are coming from and where they are going to. It's easy to track a product once it's in your facility and after it leaves, but incoming raw materials from your suppliers will be the challenge.
There is a certain amount of time allowed to register your production facility after the Act goes into effect, there is a required renewal/re-registration every 2 years thereafter.
There followed Lunch.
The second session of the day didn't really have anything of great interest to me and I hadn't done a tasting yet so Kirk and I went to the Fermented Foods tasting. This was cheese, bread, and beer and was moderated by a bread guy, a beer guy, and a cheese guy. Now, these are notoriously hard to do. You want to select your products to highlight the item you are trying to sell. Here, in this case, it was the cheese but the beer guy was trying to sell the beer and the bread guy was trying to sell the bread. Plus, the beer guy was going through all that puffed up hoo-ha that wine and beer guys teach to "properly" taste the wine and beer. And he was really, really slow. The people at our table eventually ended up doing our own pairings that came out tasting much better. On top of it all something triggered a migraine which fully bloomed the next day.
I ended up going back to the hotel room and trying to get ahead of the pain when I could. Wasn't successful but forced myself to go to the awards reception that evening.
Saturday dawned and I was in serious pain but I didn't want to miss anything, the sessions that day were the most interesting to me.
First session was Milk Composition and was a crash course in microbiology 101. It was absolutely fascinating. I'm typing up my notes from this separately so I can add it to my cheesemaking notes binders. I can really see how this can help me to develop my milking herd depending on the type of cheese I want to make, and help me use the milk to the best advantage. Made me want to go out and buy a chemistry set and enroll in the professor's summer course.
Second session saw Kirk in the Growing Mold Gracefully seminar with Sister Noella. I attended a similar session 6 or 7 years ago that was also given by her and just fell in love with images of molds and yeasts as seen through an electron microscope. So, as I've already essentially gone to that I attended the second half of my previous session, Microbial Activity of Milk. The main lesson to take home from this was that milk is a great growing medium if you're a bug. That's why it's in the high risk category for FSMA. The professor explained why pH is so important as well as how best to select a starter culture for the type of cheese you are working to create. He commented more than once that many of the cheeses he judged for the competition had evidence of contamination primarily because the cheesemaker wasn't contolling the environment and the conditions the milk was under to prevent gas forming bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, or slow the growth of psychrotrophic bacteria. He then showed us what cheese mites look like under a microscope. I now want to rearrange the storage shelves in the coolers and clean all the racks down. Fascinating but yucko!
Lunch break.
The final session was probably the most important of the entire conference. The Society brought in a guy from the FDA as well as his Canadian counterpart. They were there to inform us the direction the gov't regulators are going in regards to cheesemaking and raw milk vs. pasteurized milk. All of their discussion points made a great deal of sense and are the direction I was hoping they would go. It sounds like the regulations for raw milk will be adjusted to be based upon the type of cheese being made but then also backed up by data. They are developing a comprehensive risk profile for different classes of cheese but it is a very complex problem. He stated that the FDA will NOT be requiring a longer 60 waiting/aging period for raw milk cheeses. The HACCP plan would bring traceability into it and record keeping will be essential. The Society's stand is that we should self regulate before the gov't can get into the act and restrict our practices, much like other organisations do - most notably the NRA and the practice of architecture.
The FDA representative said that the ideal way to approach this problem is to establish a performance standard and allow the industry flexibility to meet that standard. They desire to apply cheesemaking specifics, maintain hygenic/safe processes, and overestimate pathogens in how you respond to handling the product.
I was impressed by how well behaved all the people in the session were, it was a real boon to have these two speakers there and this particular topic can become quite heated very quickly.
I ended up leaving the session about 10 minutes before it was over as my head was killing me and was affecting my stomach. Made it back to the hotel and tossed my cookies. Spent the rest of the night trying to deal with the pain. Unfortunately I missed the end of conference Gala. They had all 1600+ cheeses that had been entered in the competition out on display for tasting but I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the noise, the crowd, or the food.
The next morning we left for home. Boo. Wish we had more time to spend up there, it was quite a lovely place.