Conference registration went live earlier this month, and by the volume of questions we've gotten since, most members have that part sorted. The one that keeps coming up separately is entry into the competition itself — a different form, a different deadline, and, for a lot of first-time entrants, a different level of nerves than deciding whether to book a hotel room.
This year's competition runs alongside the annual conference in July, and entries are sorted into six categories: Soft-Ripened, Alpine Styles, Aged Cheddar & Territorials, Fresh & Pasta Filata, Washed Rind, and Blue Veined. If you've been making the same style for years, picking your category is easy. If you're sitting on two or three wheels that could plausibly go in different directions, that's worth a call to the Awards & Competition Committee before you commit — categories are judged against different standards, and a wheel that's merely good in one category can be genuinely competitive in another.
The part people underestimate
The entry itself is simple paperwork. What trips members up is timing the wheel. Competition submissions have to reflect a make that's actually at its intended maturity on the day it's judged, not a make that happens to be sitting in the cave when the deadline lands. Members who've entered before generally start working backward from the conference date months earlier, not weeks — checking their production calendar against what a given style needs to hit peak condition, then picking the batch that lines up, rather than picking a batch and hoping the timing works out.
The call for entries typically closes a handful of weeks before the conference itself, which puts the real planning window right about now for anyone whose cheese needs meaningful aging time between now and July. If your style ages fast, you have more runway than it feels like. If it doesn't, this week is a reasonable one to actually check your cave log against the calendar instead of assuming it'll work out.
We wrote earlier this week about the path onto a judging panel through the Sensory Evaluation Certificate and Competition Judge Accreditation — worth a look if scoring wheels rather than submitting them is more your speed this year. The two tracks, entrant and judge, pull from the same event but ask for very different kinds of preparation, and the Awards & Competition Committee fields questions on both all the way up to the deadline.
Either way, the practical first step is the same: get in touch with the committee now rather than in June. They can tell you which categories are shaping up thin this year, what the actual entry deadline is, and whether the wheel you're thinking of submitting is realistically going to be ready in time. That conversation is a lot more useful five or six weeks out than five or six days out.
First-time entrants ask the same three questions
We hear the same handful of questions every spring from members who've never entered before, so it's worth answering them here instead of one at a time. First: no, you do not need to have shown at conference before to enter the competition — plenty of first entries come in from members who've never set foot in the exhibit hall. Second: one entry per category per member is standard, so if you're weighing two wheels for the same category, pick the one that's more consistent across the batch rather than the single best wheel you've ever pulled, since judges are scoring what's in front of them that day, not your best day on record. Third: shipping matters more than people expect. A wheel that travels poorly can lose points on presentation before a judge even tastes it, so ask the committee about packing and transit guidance rather than guessing.
None of that is complicated, but it's also not the kind of thing most members think to ask about until the week before the deadline, which is exactly the week it's hardest to fix. A quick note to the committee now costs nothing and saves a scramble later.
If you're reading this and realizing your best candidate wheel won't hit peak condition until well past any reasonable entry window, that's not a reason to skip this cycle entirely — it's a reason to start tracking it for next year's conference instead. Members who've built a habit of entering tell us the second and third years are easier than the first, mostly because they've already worked out which batches in their production calendar line up naturally with competition timing. The first year is the one where you're guessing; after that, you're just checking a calendar you've already built.
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.