It is exactly one week until Thanksgiving (eek! Yay!) and then the rest of the holidays will be here in one quick leap, so I wanted to give you a look at what it takes to get this shop ready for all the fun. A behind the scenes look at the cheese shop! What you’ve been waiting for, I’m sure. Prep begins in July when we preorder our first holiday items to arrive in November. This is my first year as the grocery buyer for the store, so I looked back at old emails and invoices from last year as well as data on how many of certain items we sold to make my best guess on what our customers might want this year. The key is to buy enough to make it through the whole holiday season, but not too much that we have a bunch of marshmallow elves on our shelves in January. Since many of these products are from overseas or from teeny tiny producers, it’s a bit of a crapshoot as to whether what I ordered in July will even show up in November.

Ok so. We’ve ordered what we think we’ll need for grocery, cheese, wine and beer, and that’s all fun and good, but then it actually arrives at the shop. Suddenly, our small back room feels even smaller as products are delivered in large drops, turning the space into a labyrinth of boxes. The whole crew leaps into action with each delivery to move the cheese into the walk-in fridge (Brie, our cheese buyer, spends a lot of time in the walk-in, Tetris-ing cheese wheels and salami sticks) and get as many cases of grocery products out on the floor as possible. Jimmy, Chris, and Molly price products like mad as I run up and down the ladder pushing things a little farther over there and a little tighter together here to get just one more case of crackers on the shelf. Take a look at the usually-empty top of the shelves next time your in the shop and you’ll see cases and cases of crackers, chips, cookies, and drinks packed away up there. By the time I head home, I feel like I’ve been at the gym for eight hours, up down up down up down on that ladder. I think the entire staff has been sweating for the past 10 days as we try to get the store in order.

All this preparation can be tiring but it also feels festive! The busy buzzing around the shop means that fun times are on the horizon. With all these products, seasonal cheeses and special wines in the shop, it feels like it’s time to entertain and be entertained. Let the holidays begin!

For the love of cheese and the holiday season,

Kiri

Holiday Prep: Behind the Scenes