The Training Module.

Seven modules. Sixty-three pages. The same systems I built running specialty departments at Whole Foods Market and H-E-B / Central Market — cutting, wrapping, merchandising, training, flow, shrink, and the procedures that tie it all together.

• Cutting & wrapping — signature technique that presents cheese at its best and preserves its flavor
• Merchandising — variety sells better than one stale style; give customers choices
• Station setup — setting up your line for the specific cuts you're running
• Training content — operational frameworks that actually onboard a team
• Procedures — optimize, streamline, maximize: the department as a system

Own It Forever

Questions before you buy? Talk to Michael →

The Proven 2-Week Program

Two proven weeks across three levels, 202 pages. This is not a book for a shelf — it is an operating system for a cheese counter. You hand it to a new hire on day one and run your floor on it for the next two weeks. Built for the shop that is struggling, and for the shop that is doing fine but knows its procedures are held together by memory instead of paper.

Three levels, two weeks

• Level One · Week 1 — foundations, the cut, the wrap, the station. Everything before anyone is trusted alone at the counter.
• Level Two · Week 2 — families, affinage, the palate. Week 2 carries Taste the Teleport as the house tasting protocol.
• Level Three · Weeks 1–2 — the business and the floor. Procedural Anticipation, Zone Ownership, Team Strengths & Weaknesses, and Delegation, each landing in the week where it actually bites.

• Week 2 is a bench-readiness evaluation under our own standard — can this person open the counter, break down a wheel to spec, wrap five formats, price a case, and talk a guest through eight families.
• Printed claim tiers. Every science claim is labelled in the margin as solid, real-but-early, or trade practice. No other cheese training material tells you which of its own claims are settled.
• Source lists for both weeks — and a printed appendix of what we could not verify and therefore refused to state.
• A kid panel in every level — “The Little Monger,” knife-free by design, for a shop that wants to run a children’s cheese class.
• The shop half, not just the monger half — who owns which zone, what a manager checks at each level gate, and how to actually run the two weeks on a live floor. This is the part that makes it a business purchase rather than a book.
• 38 authored diagrams — cut geometry, fold sequences, the coagulation pathway, the affinage envelope, margin versus markup, case planograms.

What the licence covers. One shop at one location, with unlimited internal printing — run off a copy for every bench and every new hire, for as long as you own the shop. You receive both editions: the screen PDF with live links and bookmarks, and the print-ready interior built for wire-o binding so it lies flat on a wet bench. Emailed within 24 hours; Michael follows up personally. Digital download — all sales final. Several locations, or want it installed on your floor rather than handed over? Call (213) 300-4197 first.

Founding Patron

The Training Module is included with Founding Patron. The Proven 2-Week Program is a separate shop licence and is not part of it.

• The Training Module included — the seven-module bench manual, yours to keep. The Proven 2-Week Program is not included; it is a separate shop licence.
• The complete Cheese & Wine Library, forever — and never the $249 yearly fee.
• Cheese News every week, the full member issue.
• Priority at our cheese and wine events, and the right to suggest new Library entries.

One payment, individuals only, all sales final. The Training Module, the complete Library and every weekly Cheese News issue — permanently.

The Cheese Library

The module is the system. The library is the reference shelf — 120 cheeses, 39 wines, one reliable place. Together they cover the whole craft.