Questions we get weekly.

Individual is $170 a year, Creamery $480, Retailer $390 and Affiliate $260. The tier is decided by what your organization does, not by its size: Creamery if you make cheese, Retailer if you sell it at counter or wholesale, Affiliate if you supply the trade as a supplier, laboratory or distributor, and Individual if the membership is yours rather than an employer’s.

Creamery covers up to 6 staff and Retailer up to 4 under the one membership. The full rate card is on the Join page, and the detail is in Membership & dues.

Dues are annual and billed on your join date, so your membership year runs from the day you joined rather than from January. Auto-renew is optional. With it on, we take the dues on the anniversary; with it off, we send a renewal notice 30 days before and a reminder at 7 days.

You can switch auto-renew, change the card and download receipts from your account at any time. More in Renewals & your account.

Move up at any time and we bill the difference, prorated to your renewal date. Move down at renewal. We do not pause memberships, because a paused member stops receiving the brief and the archive, which is usually the opposite of what they need.

Since 2025 the board has offered hardship dues for members whose creamery has closed or is close to it. Write to Membership Operations; the conversation is confidential and the answer is usually yes.

A Creamery membership covers up to 6 staff and a Retailer membership up to 4. Each covered person gets their own account, their own brief and their own member rate on courses and events; the organization gets one vote. Adding or swapping a name is a note to Membership Operations, not a new invoice. Affiliate and Individual memberships cover one person each.

The ladder runs Cheese Foundations Certificate → Certified Cheese Professional → Food Safety & HACCP Certificate → Advanced Affinage, and each rung assumes the one below it. Under two years in the trade, start with Foundations: six weeks on milk composition, the cheese families, sanitation and the vocabulary of affinage.

If you are behind a counter and already fluent, go straight to the Certified Cheese Professional exam — most candidates prepare for six to nine months. See the whole ladder, or read Certifications.

The certificates do not expire. The Certified Cheese Professional credential is reconfirmed every five years, either by sitting the current exam or by logging continuing education from the course catalog — most people choose the second.

Every membership tier carries a discount on credential exams from the day you join, and members pay member rates on all 63 courses this year.

The conference runs for three days in October: competition results with the score sheets on the tables, a public review of the six category standards, the member organization floor, the hands-on sessions, and the governance — the annual election and the committee reports. Early-bird registration closes 30 September.

Plenty is online. The virtual symposium began in 2021 as a stopgap and stayed; webinars and sessions run year-round and recordings live in the members’ archive. See the notice board.

The Monday brief goes to every member each week: prices, policy movement, and what other members are doing. Members also get the full brief archive, the competition score sheets, everything the Federation has filed in a comment period, and the session recordings.

The blog is open to anyone, and so is the Cheese Library. The archive, the score sheets and the recordings are for members. Reports are on the research page.

All 641 member organizations across 41 countries are listed and searchable by what they do and where they are — creameries, shops and wholesale buyers, laboratories and distributors. Creamery members also appear in the buyers’ directory, which is the listing buyers actually shop from.

You control your own entry. Ask Membership Operations to correct it, expand it, or take it down.

Every membership carries one vote, whatever it costs, and the annual election is announced at the October conference. Six committees do most of the work: Standards, Food Safety, Education, Events, Membership and Advocacy. Seats are open to members, not reserved for the board, and an Individual membership includes one.

For careers, the careers page collects member vacancies, the apprenticeship strand and every volunteer role. Ask Membership Operations for a committee seat — the committees that need people are usually the ones nobody thinks to ask about.