One of these days, we’ll feel totally comfortable with going into cheese shops again. In the meantime, a lot of us are ordering online. As you can imagine, shipping cheese is not remotely like shipping books. Novels don’t need gel packs and insulated boxes. If your book gets stalled in a warm warehouse over a weekend, no harm done. A Planet Cheese reader recently complained to me about a merchant’s shipping charge, so I thought I would dig a little more deeply. Are sellers raking it in on the shipping, or does it really cost that much to get the Brie to you?

“We know that, above all, customers don’t like paying for shipping,” says Lisa Griffiths of igourmet, the Pennsylvania-based online merchant. “They see Amazon Prime, where everything you order you’re going to get the next day and not pay for shipping. But it’s a shirt, or a toothbrush. It’s not a perishable item.”

I spoke at length to Griffiths and to Zoe Brickley of Jasper Hill Farm, the Vermont creamery, which has seen online sales skyrocket since the pandemic began. Both, in my experience, do outstanding jobs of shipping cheese. The logistics make my head hurt.

“The supply chain has been drastically compromised, for both products and packaging,” says Griffiths. “Some suppliers have products but not labels. Some have packaging but no product. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle.”

When the pandemic struck, Jasper Hill saw sales plummet 50 percent overnight. The company sold cows, slowed cheese production and shifted resources into building online sales. The results have been phenomenal. Online sales in August were up 600 percent over the same month last year. But labor and materials costs have soared, too, because cheese that used to leave the creamery on pallets, as whole wheels, now has to be cut into consumer portions, wrapped, packaged and shipped.

I’m sharing a few edited and condensed snippets of our conversations to help clarify some of the issues around shipping logistics and costs.

What do you wish consumers knew about shipping? What do we just not get?

LG: That food shipping is different from shipping clothing or household goods. Ample packaging and refrigerant must be used to ensure quality. This comes at a price, but it is a requirement in the world of gourmet food. Our company does not make a profit on shipping.

ZB: We put everywhere: “Your box might be aromatic; your box might not be ice cold.” It doesn’t need to be near-frozen to be safe. People will get a box at 55°F and want their money back. But that cheese has been at that temperature its whole life. It doesn’t even get to refrigerator temperature until the day before we ship it. I wish people would be a little more aware of that reality.

Can you break down the costs for us a bit?

LG: Typically, about 80 percent of the shipping cost is transportation and about 20 percent is packaging.

ZB: The box materials, the liner, the ice packs—that’s in the $5 to $6 range. Our negotiated shipping rates are basically half of what a consumer would pay. Averaged out across the country, in winter we’re in the $25 range, in summer, we’re in the $30 range. Packaging is on top of that.

What are some lessons you’ve learned over the years?

ZB: We’ve developed a way to assign the least-expensive label that will get a package to its destination in one to two transit days. If Ground can get us there in two days, we’ll send it two-day. Florida always gets express. I look at heat maps. My rule of thumb is: If, on average, it’s 70°F or lower at that time of year in that region, we ship two-day. If it’s above 70°F, we ship overnight. I programmed it by state, by zone, and in some areas by zip code. I have all these automation rules that we toggle on and off depending on the time of year. A human being can’t make that call; it has to be programmed.

We did get “hot box” complaints when the pandemic started and UPS was not getting there overnight. UPS was like, “Don’t put in any claims because you’re not going to get any money back.” So we just assume a certain percentage of re-ships, and we raised the minimum order for free shipping to help us cover those costs.

What are you doing to be more eco-friendly?

LG: In the old days we used Styrofoam. Today’s customer wants packaging they can compost, re-use or recycle. For the last 15 years, we’ve been moving in that direction. We’re using TempGuard®, an absorbent box liner material made from Kraft paper; it’s recyclable. The gel packs you can bust open and use on your plants. [As a gardener, I loved this. In some of the shipments I have received from igourmet, the gel packs contained a jelly-like fertilizer.] We are constantly sourcing recyclable materials and then market-testing their performance.

ZB: To avoid using two boxes, my goal was a box inside a padded liner with the shipping label on the liner. We are working on finding a more “green” liner, but all the companies innovating in packaging are totally backed up. Inside our box is Sylvacurl, our Vermont neighbor’s shaved poplar. It’s cool to see them have more opportunities.

You must have some agonizing moments. Any shipping horror stories with happy endings?

LG: No particular story comes to mind, but I can tell you that, more times than not, when we call a distribution hub to speak with the carrier, we end up in a conversation about the cheeses in the packages. We’ve had situations where the shipper put the package in their own work refrigerator to keep it cold. We don’t expect that, but we appreciate it.

ZB: We had a customer service complaint from somebody who did not like how the cheese tasted. After asking several questions, we realized they had opened and eaten the ice pack.