Competition judging is one of the few things in this trade that genuinely can't be done remotely. You can teach a class over video, you can walk someone through a swab map on a screen share, but you cannot smell a wheel or feel its paste give under your thumb through a webcam. That's made this an unusual year for our Competition Judge Accreditation credential, and for the judging panels it feeds.
Several regional shows this year have had to cancel their in-person judging entirely rather than try to replicate it online, and the ones that have found a workaround have leaned on a hybrid model: entries get shipped or dropped to a small number of accredited judges working in person, in a space with distancing between stations, while scoring discussion and deliberation happen over video instead of gathered around a table. It's not identical to a normal judging day, but early reports from shows that have tried it suggest the actual scoring holds up reasonably well, as long as the in-person tasting step stays intact.
What the credential actually requires
Competition Judge Accreditation sits on top of the Sensory Evaluation Certificate. To earn it, a member needs that certificate plus supervised experience on an actual judging panel — you don't get accredited from coursework alone, because judging is a skill that only shows up under real conditions, with real variation between entries and real time pressure. It's also one of the faster-lapsing credentials in our program: two years, and it assumes you're staying active on panels, not just holding a certificate in a drawer. A judge who hasn't sat a panel in a while is a judge whose palate calibration has drifted, whether or not they'd say so themselves.
That structure is part of why this year is awkward. Members partway through their supervised panel requirement have had fewer opportunities to log the hours, since so many shows have been canceled or scaled back. We've heard from a handful of members asking whether we'd relax the requirement this year. We're not going to, for the same reason a food-safety credential doesn't get easier during a bad year: the standard is what makes the credential worth having, and a shortcut now undermines every judge's card that was earned the normal way.
What we're doing instead
What we can do is make the opportunities that do exist easier to find. The Awards & Competition Committee is keeping a running list of regional shows still holding some form of in-person judging this year and flagging which ones have openings for a supervised panelist. If you're partway through the requirement and running short on time before your Sensory Evaluation Certificate needs renewing, reach out to the committee directly — in a normal year we'd tell you to be patient, but this isn't a normal year, and it's worth a conversation about your specific timeline.
If you're earlier in the process and just starting toward the Sensory Evaluation Certificate, that part hasn't changed — the coursework is still running on its usual schedule and can be completed from home. The panel requirement is the piece that needs an actual room with actual cheese in it, and for now, that's simply going to take some extra patience to arrange.
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.