A week from today, the ICF Annual Conference happens — just not where we originally booked it. We announced back in April that Portland was moving online, and the 21st is when that plan becomes real. This week we want to walk you through what the day actually looks like, because "virtual conference" has meant a lot of different things this year and ours is not a webinar wearing a name tag.
Case counts nationally are climbing again, sharply, in states that had seemed to be past the worst of it. That's the backdrop for this decision, and we don't think it needs much more explanation than that. A room full of cheesemakers, distributors, and retail buyers standing shoulder to shoulder at a trade floor was never going to happen this July, and we'd rather run a good virtual day than a compromised in-person one.
What's on the schedule
The day is built around three blocks rather than a wall-to-wall agenda, because we learned from June's webinars that six hours of video calls in a row is nobody's idea of a conference. Morning opens with a market outlook session — where wholesale cheese pricing has actually been and where the federation's read on the next quarter sits, which matters more than usual given how strange the spread between the wholesale and food-service channels has been all summer.
Midday is competition results. Judging happened over video this year, entries shipped to a single site rather than a show floor, and we'll walk through how that changed the process for both entrants and judges — worth hearing if you're weighing whether to enter next year. Afternoon closes with two breakout tracks: one on food safety planning for a plant running with a thinner crew, one on selling direct when your usual buyers are still closed.
What you'll need
A stable connection matters more than a fancy one. We're also sending a small physical kit to registered attendees — three wheels for a guided tasting during the closing session, timed so everyone is cutting into the same cheese at the same moment no matter which time zone they're in. If you registered but haven't gotten a shipping confirmation, check your inbox before Friday; we're mailing in batches and don't want anyone's kit arriving on the 22nd.
We know a laptop is not a trade floor. It won't replace the hallway conversation where you find out who's short on rennet or which distributor is actually answering their phone this month. We're building a message board into the platform for exactly that kind of exchange, and we'd rather you use it messily than not use it at all.
We talked, briefly, about postponing the whole thing to 2021 rather than running a first-ever virtual conference on short notice. We decided against it. Case counts are still climbing in much of the country, testing turnaround has gotten slower rather than faster in a lot of places, and there's no real evidence next spring looks meaningfully different from this July. A membership that's already absorbed a canceled show season doesn't need a canceled conference on top of it — it needs the market outlook, the competition results, and the chance to compare notes, even if the format is new.
Side conversations happen differently over a message board than they do at a coffee station between sessions, and we'd rather be honest about that trade-off than oversell the platform. What we can control is making the content genuinely useful and the schedule humane, and that's where we've put the planning time. To that end, every attendee gets a backup dial-in number in their confirmation email in case the video platform has trouble — treat it as a just-in-case, not as an afterthought you can ignore. If your kit hasn't shipped by Friday, email the events team directly rather than waiting; we'd rather send a rush replacement than have someone sitting in front of an empty cutting board during the tasting.
If you haven't registered yet, there's still room — the link is on the events page, and the fee covers the tasting kit shipping regardless of where you're logging in from. We'll see you on the 21st, laptops and all.
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.