About
Founded in 2014 by a handful of creameries and the buyers who sold for them, on the premise that the people who make cheese and the people who sell it should be in the same room more than once a year.
The Federation is a trade association for cheesemakers, affineurs, mongers and buyers. We do four things: we run a credential ladder that means something on a résumé; we run a competition judged blind and published with the score sheets; we file on the rules that decide what a member can legally make, label and ship; and we publish a weekly brief so that a maker in one country knows what happened to the price in another.
We are member-governed. Every membership carries one vote whatever it costs, committee seats are open to members rather than reserved for the board, and the annual election is announced at the October conference. The staff are small by design; most of the work is done by members on committees.
Three thousand and fifty-eight people belong, across 641 member organizations in 41 countries — farmstead creameries with two vats, regional plants, shop counters, wholesale buyers, laboratories, distributors and a good number of individual members between jobs or on the way up the ladder.
Any member may ask for a committee seat; Individual membership includes one.
Five roles carry the day-to-day work. We list them by role: this is a demonstration site, and inventing people to fill them would not help anyone.
Answers to the board, carries the Federation's position into rooms members cannot all be in, and owns the budget.
Applications, tiers, dues, renewals, hardship dues and the organization directory. Most member email starts here.
The Monday brief, the blog, the archive, and telling members when a tariff line or a labeling rule has moved.
The four rungs, the 63 courses, the exam sittings and the Brook, Meadow, Alpine and Birch cohorts.
The October conference, the workshops, the webinars, and the logistics of getting several hundred wheels judged blind.
Three commitments, written into the constitution in 2014 and read out at every annual general session since, mostly so that somebody can object to them if they have stopped being true.
Quality and safety questions get settled with data, published with the method, and reopened when better data arrives. The competition is judged blind to a public standard for the same reason: a result nobody can check is not a result.
A two-vat farmstead and a regional plant have the same vote and the same standing in a comment packet. When we file on a rule, the test is whether a member can still make, label and ship — not whether the largest members can.
Most of what a maker knows is undocumented, and it leaves when they do. The credential ladder, the apprenticeship strand and the endangered styles registry all exist to slow that down. It is the quiet crisis in the trade and the least dramatic thing we do.
641 organizations in 41 countries, unevenly. Being honest about the unevenness is more useful than a map with a dot on every continent.
The largest share of the membership and where the office is. Farmstead creameries, regional plants, shop counters and the wholesale buyers who move most of it.
The deepest bench on affinage and the most engaged on labeling and geographic protection. Most of the Advanced Affinage cohort’s cave visits happen here.
Long fresh-cheese and pasta filata traditions, and a fast-growing specialty sector. The membership here has roughly doubled since the virtual strand started.
The fastest-growing region and the one with the most new makes. Members here ask the hardest questions about adapting a style to a market that has no memory of it.
Established northern traditions alongside newer makes further south. The emerging-regions initiative does most of its work here, and the membership is smaller than it should be.
Some of the oldest continuous cheesemaking anywhere, and a standing reminder to the Standards Committee that a definition written around one continent is not a definition.
Find any of them in the organization directory — how it works is on the directory FAQ.
Fictional demonstration
Everything on this site is invented. There is no International Cheese Federation, no More Cheese, no competition, no credential ladder and no member at 1 Rind Lane. The site exists to show what an association's public web presence looks like when it is built on MemberJunction: membership tiers and dues, an education catalog, an events board, an advocacy program and a publication, all of which map onto real records behind the scenes. The names, the numbers, the quotations and the history are there to make the demonstration legible, not to describe anything that exists.