Mark November 23 on your calendar: Webinar: Judging Standards 2021 is our next scheduled virtual session, and it's aimed at two audiences at once — members thinking about entering next year's competition, and members considering the judging table instead of the entry table. Both groups tend to assume the other side of that line is simpler than it is, and this session is built to correct that in about ninety minutes.
Like most of our webinars this year, it's virtual by design rather than by necessity. We've heard from enough members over the past two cycles that the format actually works better for a topic like judging standards — you can pull up your own competition entry history or a photo of last year's wheel while a panelist walks through a scoring rubric, which is harder to do usefully in a conference-room chair. It's a lesson the wider competitive-cheese world has been learning at the same time we have: several trade competitions elsewhere in the industry either paused their in-person judging entirely this year or rebuilt it around remote formats, and reporting on those events kept landing on the same finding our own members report back — a screen is a worse substitute for tasting a wheel in person, but a genuinely good one for teaching the scoring logic behind that tasting.
What the session actually covers
The webinar walks through how our Awards & Competition Committee structures scoring across categories, what separates a good entry from a great one on the technical side (rind integrity, paste texture, moisture balance) versus the sensory side (aroma, flavor development, finish), and where entrants most often lose points without realizing it. That last part tends to be the most useful ninety seconds of the whole session for first-time entrants — the small, fixable things, not the big obvious flaws.
For members who've been thinking about pursuing Competition Judge Accreditation, this is also a low-stakes way to see what judging actually involves before committing to the credential pathway. Accreditation asks you to score consistently against a shared rubric under time pressure, which is a different skill than knowing good cheese when you taste it, and the webinar gives you an honest preview of that gap.
Bring a specific question, and think about timing
Sessions like this go better when members show up with something concrete rather than a general "how does judging work" question. If you entered a competition this year and got a score that surprised you, bring the category and the general feedback you received — panelists can usually speak to the pattern even without your specific scoresheet in front of them. If you're weighing whether to enter for the first time next cycle, bring the style of cheese you're considering entering; category fit trips up more first-time entrants than quality does.
Registration is open now through our events calendar, and the session records for members who can't make the live time. If you're on the fence about the accreditation pathway, this is the cheapest way we know to find out whether it's a fit before you commit a season to it.
We schedule this session ahead of the winter planning stretch on purpose. Members who enter competitions the following year tend to start shaping which wheels they'll hold back for entry, and how, sometime between now and January — a rind that needs another eight weeks of washing to peak in time for a spring deadline needs that decision made now, not in March. Waiting until entry forms open to think about scoring standards means you're reacting to a rubric instead of aging toward one.
The same timing logic applies on the judging side. Our Awards & Competition Committee recruits and trains new judges over the winter so they're ready for the following year's competition calendar, and this webinar is usually where members first raise a hand. If judging interests you but you've never said so out loud to anyone at the federation, showing up to this session and asking a question afterward is a perfectly good way to start that conversation. Nobody is going to hand you a scoresheet on the spot, but it's how the conversation usually begins.
We'll follow up after the session with a short summary and a link to the recording for anyone who registers, whether or not you make the live date.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.