Registration is now open for the ICF Annual Conference 2025, which we're holding this July in Sacramento. It's the one week a year when the federation's committees, courses, and competition all show up in the same building, and if you've only ever known us through email newsletters and a webinar login, it's worth experiencing in person at least once.
We built this year's schedule around what members have actually been telling us, not around a theme we picked in a planning meeting. That means fewer sessions about growth and expansion, and more about margin, energy costs, and how a small farmstead operation gets through a hard year without losing the thing that made it distinctive in the first place. If this spring has felt like a run of bad math — a milk check that moved the wrong direction, a utility bill that ate a bigger share of your cave budget than it used to — you are not the only one walking into Sacramento with those numbers in your head.
What's on the schedule
The Education Committee has built out sessions tied directly to courses members ask about most: cave management for small rooms, listeria control practices sized for a one- or two-person creamery, and a session specifically for members thinking about direct-to-consumer sales as a hedge against a wholesale account that's gotten harder to count on. The Awards & Competition Committee will run the in-person judging and awards ceremony that several of our members wait all year for — if you've been quietly aging something you're proud of, this is the venue for it. And the Standards and Food Safety Committees are holding open sessions rather than closed-door meetings this year, so members can hear directly what's being discussed before anything reaches a comment period.
Evenings are, as always, mostly unscheduled on purpose. Some of the most useful conversations we hear about afterward happen at a shared table after the formal sessions end, between a member three years into the business and one three decades in.
The practical details
Sacramento in July runs warm, so pack accordingly, and the host hotel's block tends to fill before the early rate expires — book sooner rather than later if your travel plans are firm. If cost is the barrier rather than the calendar, reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee directly; a limited number of scholarship registrations exist for members whose year has been tight, and this year we expect more members than usual to qualify.
If you've never registered for an in-person ICF event before, start with the conference page linked from your member portal — it walks through session tracks, lodging, and the registration fee schedule in one place, and it's the most current source for anything that changes between now and July. We'll have more detail on individual sessions as speakers and panels are finalized over the next several weeks. For now: the dates are set, the room block is open, and we'd like to see more of our small-creamery members in the room this year than we have in the last couple.
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.