The Challenge
Cheese Merchants of America is one of the nation's leading hard cheese converters, processors, and value-added cheese manufacturers — serving retail, foodservice, industrial ingredient, and private label customers with precision-cut, shredded, grated, and custom-packaged specialty cheeses including Parmesan, Romano, Asiago, and Fontina. Since 1998, they've built a supply chain that spans global sourcing, aging, inventory management, quality assurance, food safety, logistics, and nationwide distribution.
Operating five facilities meant that any inefficiency in front-office operations was multiplied across the organization. Their visitor management process relied on a dedicated receptionist — a manual, labor-intensive workflow that became a primary target when leadership launched a broader initiative to digitize business processes, improve security, and reduce administrative overhead.
The challenge wasn't just replacing a paper sign-in sheet. It was replacing an entire workflow: visitor arrival, host notification, recordkeeping, food safety compliance, and audit readiness — all of which had been dependent on a single point of human contact at each facility.
Why Visitly
The selection process was rigorous. Cheese Merchants evaluated several cloud-based visitor management platforms against a clear set of criteria: ease of deployment, feature depth, ease of use, multi-facility scalability, and overall value. Visitly provided the best balance across all five dimensions.
The free trial was central to the decision — it gave the team the ability to validate that Visitly met their operational requirements before committing to a company-wide rollout. SOC 2 Type II certification was a positive signal during evaluation, confirming the security maturity appropriate for an organization handling food safety compliance and serving enterprise retail and foodservice customers.
"Visitly helped us modernize our visitor management process while simplifying operations across multiple facilities. It has become an important part of how we manage security, efficiency, and the overall visitor experience."
Features in Use
Cheese Merchants uses five core capabilities across all five facilities — each addressing a specific gap left by the previous manual workflow.
Operational Impact
The headline outcome was workforce consolidation. By automating the visitor management portion of the receptionist role, Cheese Merchants was able to redistribute remaining front-office responsibilities and eliminate the need for a dedicated receptionist position — an operational impact equivalent to approximately one full-time administrative headcount.
The before-vs-after difference across the organization was significant across every dimension of the visitor process:
What They Said
"Our experience has been very positive. The platform has been reliable, easy to administer, and well received by both employees and visitors.
Focus on the broader operational impact rather than simply replacing a paper sign-in sheet. Visitly automates an entire workflow, improves visibility, and helps standardize visitor management across your organization."
— Hagen Zang, VP of Information Technology, Cheese Merchants of America
Cheese Merchants of America is one of the nation's leading hard cheese converters, processors, and value-added manufacturers, specializing in premium Italian-style hard cheeses since 1998. Headquartered in Bartlett, IL, Cheese Merchants operates five facilities across the USA serving retail, foodservice, industrial ingredient, and private label customers throughout North America.
