By Janet Fletcher

Clothes and cars get marked down when the new models arrive, but what can you do with cheese that’s on the downhill slope? At least last season’s dresses don’t self-destruct before your eyes. Cheeses get moldy, funky, slimy, smelly and downright impossible to sell. Some head south really quickly.

Minimizing cheese waste can be a challenge. To keep your cheese-counter losses small, consider these ten proactive suggestions, gathered from retailers in diverse settings around the country.

Give slow movers top billing.
Review and prioritize the case every morning. Know which cheeses most need to walk out the door that day, and tell your staff to make sure they do. “I put up lists for employees, saying these are the cheeses we need to push,” says Connie Bennett, deli manager and cheese buyer for De Laurenti in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Give that cheese high visibility on your counter and sample it aggressively, perhaps with a recipe or serving suggestion.

“When we see that something needs to go, it will be our featured cheese of the day,” says Lisa Nead, owner of the Wine Merchant in Naples, Fla. “We type up something to educate people on it, we give them a taste, and it’s unbelievable. It moves.”

Review sanitation procedures.
Maintaining a sanitary food prep area is key to minimizing waste, says Gordon Edgar of San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery, a worker cooperative that sells primarily pre-cut and wrapped cheese. At Rainbow Grocery, cheese knives are sanitized—not just wiped with a hand towel—each time an employee cuts a different type of cheese, to prevent bacteria and molds from traveling. “We also clean our boards between every cheese,” says Edgar. “We don’t think, ‘Oh, it’s all Swiss.’”

Blue cheeses demand extra vigilance because their molds can easily infect other cheeses. Rainbow Grocery staffers try to cut blues at the end of their shift so they can bleach work surfaces afterward. “You can’t do blues and go immediately to something else with just a little cleaning,” says Edgar.

Implement smart cutting practices.
At Roxanne Blake’s two Connecticut shops—Say Cheese in Simsbury and Say Cheese Too in West Hartford—employees are instructed to cut wedges on alternate sides of a wheel. “If you always cut from the right side, then the left side will begin to mold and you’ll need to clean it,” says Blake. “Whereas if you’re constantly cutting from a fresh edge, you don’t get mold.”

Retailers also advocate using a cheese wire rather than a knife whenever possible. The thin wire makes a cleaner cut, with less breakage, and without the residue that can cling to a knife.

At De Laurenti, where all cheeses are cut to order, Bennett has implemented a quarter-pound minimum purchase. That means she also will not sell part of a wedge if it leaves her with less than a quarter-pound. Bennett would rather cut into a new wheel than sell a customer, say, six ounces from an eight-ounce piece of Brillat-Savarin. “It’s one of the hardest rules to enforce,” she says. “But that little two-ounce piece is the one that goes to waste. It’s just too small or it breaks and nobody wants it.”

Change the plastic wrap.
Again and again.
Blake puts new wrap on a cheese every time she handles it, even if it’s a dozen times a day. The practice minimizes bacteria development and keeps the cheese from picking up that unpleasant wrap taste. Plastic never clings as well the second time anyway, she believes.

Inspect new deliveries critically.
Imported cheeses can especially need attention after their journey. “Italy likes to Cryovac cheese, and sometimes that Cryovac has been on there so long that the rinds can get soggy and mushy,” says Bennett. In that situation, she removes the plastic to let the cheese breathe and help the rind dry. For paper-wrapped cheeses that feel unduly sticky, she removes the paper to give them some air. She’ll also turn Stilton and other wheels that she might not cut into right away to keep them maturing evenly.

Expand your staff’s comfort zone.
Most cheese-counter employees have a few favorite cheeses they repeatedly recommend and many they ignore because they know nothing about them. Guess what cheeses sell? Make staff education a priority so workers know every cheese’s story and feel comfortable discussing each one. “If you’re relying on customers to ask about something obscure, that’s a good recipe for throwing out a bunch of cheese,” says Edgar.

Exercise self control.
It may sound obvious, but don’t overload on the most perishable cheeses. Most buyers love cheese and have a hard time saying no to something fabulous, but do you really need another soft-ripened goat cheese?

Don’t reject. Repurpose.
At De Laurenti, Cheese Buyer Bennett has an ally in the shop’s affiliated cafe. What she can no longer sell, the cafe often can in the form of a broccoli cheese soup or a blue cheese pasta salad. Other retailers get even more creative. When the Brie starts to look iffy, Blake hands out a recipe for pasta cream sauce. “You can’t make this recipe with Brie in good condition,” insists the merchant. At Rainbow Grocery, unsellable cheese goes to the kitchen, where staffers can decide if it’s salvageable.

Keep a shrink log and diary.
If you think you have a waste issue, quantify it. Keep a shrink log, weighing and noting the value of everything you toss. If your waste tops two percent, says Nead, you probably have a problem that should be addressed.

Blake recommends keeping a daily diary to log each day’s sales along with relevant notes on the weather, holidays or any occurrences that might have affected business. With that information, you have a historical record of what the Saturday before Easter is usually like in your store and you can order accordingly.

Consider markdowns, but warily.
Merchants differ in their willingness to discount cheeses that are nearing the edge. “I’d rather take the loss or sample it out,” says Edgar. “I think it’s risky to discount perishables. It sends the wrong message.”

Blake occasionally puts a cheese on sale in its final stretch but says she urges customers to taste it first. “I need them to know that it’s mature and might be stronger than they like,” she says. “I don’t want customers to get in the habit of waiting for something to be discounted. This isn’t the clothing business.”

Janet Fletcher writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and is the author of The Cheese Course.