Creamery tours
A member opens their make for an afternoon and answers the questions they would rather not answer in public. The most requested format and the hardest to schedule, because the host has to stop working.
Upcoming dates
Registration on this demonstration site is not live. Contact the Events team for anything on this board.
The Annual Conference
The Federation meets once a year, in October, and it is the only week when the whole membership is in one building. Three days: competition results announced with the score sheets on the tables, the six category standards reviewed in public, a floor of member organizations, and the sessions that are too hands-on to run over video — cave problems, case planning, the milk market year ahead.
It is also where the governance happens. The annual election is announced, committee chairs report, and the membership votes on anything the board has put forward. Early-bird registration closes 30 September; Creamery and Retailer memberships can register their covered staff under the one membership.
Attendance has grown every year except 2020, and the room in October 2025 was noticeably more mixed than it used to be: more buyers, more affiliates, more people who came for a credential and stayed for the trade.
The virtual symposium
In 2021, with travel still unreliable, the Federation ran its first fully virtual symposium in place of the spring meeting. It was meant as a stopgap. It was not treated as one: 1,100 people attended, a third of them from countries that had never sent anyone to a conference, and the sessions were recorded and left open in the archive.
The lesson stuck. The virtual format survived the year it was invented for, and today the webinar and session strand — Wholesale Negotiation, Judging Standards, apprenticeship — runs year-round alongside the in-person calendar. A member in Jura and a member in Wisconsin are in the same room for an hour, which is a thing the Federation could not do before 2021.
Recordings stay in the members' archive indefinitely.
Regional meetups
Organized by members, for members, in whatever room somebody could get. Most are free or close to it, all of them are open to any member regardless of where you are based, and a member who is traveling is usually the most interesting person there.Tasting roundtables
Six to a dozen people, everyone brings a wheel, everyone says what they actually think. New members are told to come to one of these before anything else; it is where the vocabulary stops being theoretical.
Problem clinics
One season, one problem — a cave running hot, a rind that keeps slipping, a buyer who has changed the terms. People bring the failure rather than the success, which is why these fill fastest.
Regulatory briefings
When a rule moves in a region, the Advocacy Committee sends someone to explain what it means in practice before the comment period closes. See the advocacy program.
New-member socials
No agenda and no talk. Members who joined in the last year, plus two or three who have been around long enough to be useful. Free, everywhere, always.
Start one
Nothing near you? Put six people in a room with something to taste — that is the whole job. The Events team will find you the other members nearby.
Volunteer roles →Proposing a session
The call for sessions opens about six months before the October conference and is announced in the Monday brief. Send the Events Committee a title, three or four sentences on what an attendee leaves knowing, the format you want, and how long you need. Members and non-members are read by the same committee against the same test.
What gets accepted is a specific problem, solved, by somebody who has actually solved it — cave humidity in a hot summer, what a buyer can really move on, what went wrong with a make and what fixed it. What does not is a product pitch wearing a session title, and the committee can tell the difference from the abstract.
Proposals for the year-round virtual strand are read continuously rather than in a window, which makes it the easier place to start if you have not presented before. A forty-minute webinar with fifteen minutes of questions is a real slot and it is how several of the conference regulars began.
Send proposals to events@morecheese.org, or ask first through the contact page if you are not sure whether an idea fits.
Registration, changes and refunds
Substituting a colleague is free and can be done up to the doors opening. Refunds close 15 days out, when the room numbers are committed. Recordings of conference sessions go into the members’ archive and stay there.
Events FAQContinuing education
Most Federation sessions count toward reconfirming the Certified Cheese Professional credential; each listing says so. The Annual Conference on its own will usually get you most of the way through a cycle.
The credential ladder