The ICF Annual Conference lands in Des Moines this July, and with it, the year's flagship competition. Entry windows for the major national contests tend to open in the first weeks of January — this year's dairy trade press is already carrying notices about entry deadlines and category lists for the season's big competitions — and ours is no exception. If you make anything you're proud of, this is the week to start thinking about which wheel goes in which box.
We say this every year and every year a few members write in surprised that the deadline crept up on them. The Awards & Competition Committee reviews entries across six categories — Aged Cheddar & Territorials, Alpine Styles, Blue Veined, Fresh & Pasta Filata, Soft-Ripened, and Washed Rind — and each one draws a different panel of judges with a different set of pet peeves. Knowing your category's judging emphasis in January beats guessing at it in June.
What actually changes between now and July
A wheel entered in January-thinking and judged in July-reality is two different cheeses. If you're planning to enter something still aging, be honest with yourself about the maturation curve: a washed rind that's perfect at ten weeks is not automatically perfect at twenty-four. Members who've placed consistently tell us the trick isn't making a better cheese in the spring — it's picking, in January, the batch that's already on the right trajectory and then leaving it alone.
This is also the moment to book a spot in Judging & Competition Preparation if you've never gone through a scoring rubric with a working judge before. It's not glamorous, but knowing that a judge's note about "underripe paste" reads very differently from one about "uneven rind development" will save you from entering the wrong wheel in the wrong window. The course runs through how judges score aroma, texture, and appearance separately, which sounds obvious until you realize how many first-time entrants assume it's one overall impression.
The part nobody wants to think about in January
Shipping. If your wheel needs to travel and you're planning to send it rather than hand-carry it to Des Moines, get a quote from a specialty cold-chain carrier now — outfits like Artisan Cheese Cold Chain Logistics book up their peak-season slots well before spring, and a cheese that arrives warm is a cheese that doesn't get judged fairly, if it gets judged at all. Members who've shipped internationally, including a couple of our members based overseas, tell us the customs paperwork alone can take longer to sort out than the packing.
There's also a quieter cost to entering: your time. Filling out an entry form correctly, including the make date, milk source, and aging notes a judge will want, takes longer than most first-time entrants expect. Do that paperwork now, while your notes from the actual make are still fresh, rather than trying to reconstruct them from memory in June.
Mostly, though, what the committee wants from you this month is questions. The Awards & Competition Committee fields a steady trickle of "does my cheese fit in this category or that one" messages every January, and they'd rather answer twenty of those now than watch someone enter the wrong category in July and get dinged on a technicality that had nothing to do with the cheese itself. If you've got something aging that you think might be competition-worthy, this is the week to ask, not the week before the deadline.
Registration details and category rules are posted on the member portal. If you've got a cheese you're proud of and a question about which box it belongs in, the committee takes questions year-round, and January is when they're most likely to actually answer quickly.
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.