October, and the other fifty-one weeks.

October, three days, once a year, and it is the only week when the whole membership is in one building. The location moves; it is announced in the brief in the spring and carried on the events page from then on.

Three days covers the 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 that do not work over video, and the governance — the annual election and the committee reports.

Early-bird registration closes on 30 September and rates rise at midnight. Members pay the member rate; non-members pay more and can still come.

Creamery and Retailer memberships can register their covered staff under the one membership, which is the part organizations most often miss until after the deadline.

Yes. Sessions, the organization floor and the evening events are open to anyone who registers.

Two things are not: the annual general session where the election and the votes happen is for members, and the competition score sheets are distributed to members. If you are coming anyway, joining first is usually cheaper than the non-member rate plus a year of not being a member.

No. Registration covers all three days, and we have kept it that way on purpose — the conference is built as one arc, and the sessions people rate highest are on the last morning when a day pass would have sent them home.

If three days is genuinely impossible, the virtual strand carries a good share of the content and the recordings stay in the archive.

The call for sessions opens about six months ahead and is announced in the brief and on the events page. Send the Events Committee a title, three or four sentences on what an attendee leaves knowing, the format, and how long you need.

What gets accepted: a specific problem, solved, by someone 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 get accepted: anything that is a product pitch wearing a session title. Members and non-members are both read, by the same committee, against the same test. Send proposals to events@morecheese.org.

Substitution is free and easy: email registration@morecheese.org with your confirmation and the name of whoever is coming instead, any time before the doors open. It happens constantly and nobody minds.

Cancellation refunds close 15 days out, because that is when the catering and the room numbers are committed. Inside that window, write to Registration anyway if something has happened — illness, a family emergency, a herd problem the week of. Those are read case by case, and substitution is almost always the better answer.

The conference sessions are recorded and go into the members’ archive, where they stay indefinitely. Hands-on workshops are not recorded, for the obvious reason that watching somebody else’s hands in curd teaches very little.

Everything in the year-round virtual strand is recorded and archived as a matter of course.

The virtual symposium began in 2021 as a stopgap for a year when travel was unreliable, and was not treated as one: 1,100 people came, a third of them from countries that had never sent anyone to a conference, and the sessions were left open in the archive.

It stayed. Webinars and sessions now run year-round alongside the in-person calendar — wholesale negotiation, judging standards, apprenticeship, cave problems. A member in one hemisphere and a member in another are in the same room for an hour, which the Federation could not do before 2021.

Yes and yes. Regional meetups are organized by members for members, most of them informal, most of them free or close to it: a tasting, a creamery tour, a roundtable on whatever is biting locally that season.

They are open to any member regardless of where you are based, and a member traveling is usually the most interesting person in the room. Dates are on the events page; to start one where there is nothing, write to events@morecheese.org and they will find you the other members nearby.

Most Federation sessions carry credit toward reconfirming the Certified Cheese Professional credential, and the event listing says so on each entry. The hands-on workshops and the technical sessions carry the most.

Social meetups and the organization floor do not, which surprises nobody. If you are working toward a reconfirmation date, the Annual Conference on its own will usually get you most of the way.

Not on this one. This is a demonstration build, so nothing here takes a payment or holds a place. In the live product registration writes straight to the association’s membership and order records.

Anything on the notice board can be asked about through the contact page.