Mark the calendar: the 2020 ICF Annual Conference is set for July in Portland, and as of this week the Events Committee is officially taking session proposals. If you've been sitting on an idea for a workshop, a case study, or a panel since last year's event, this is the moment to write it down and send it in.
We know some members are watching the trade-show calendar a little more closely than usual right now. This week alone, a major natural products trade show on the West Coast saw a wave of exhibitors pull out and was ultimately postponed just before it was set to open, as large retailers and food companies weighed travel risk tied to the spreading respiratory illness making headlines out of Asia and now parts of Europe. That's a food-industry event roughly ten times our size, and we don't think our situation is comparable yet, but we understand why members are asking. Portland is still four and a half months out, and nothing about our plans has changed. If anything shifts, you'll hear it from us directly and early, not secondhand, and we'd rather over-communicate now than have members guessing.
There's a practical reason to plan as though Portland proceeds normally: registration, lodging, and travel bookings all move faster and cheaper the earlier they're made, and canceling a hotel hold later is far less costly than trying to book one in June. If your creamery is deciding whether to commit staff time and travel budget to July, our honest advice this week is to proceed as planned and watch for updates, the same way we're watching.
What the program committee wants this year
Session proposals fall into four rough buckets, and we're trying to keep all four represented on the final schedule: hands-on craft (make-day walkthroughs, defect diagnosis, affinage technique), business and margin (pricing, wholesale terms, distributor relationships), regulatory and food safety (what's moving at the federal and state level and what it means on the ground), and member-to-member case studies, which are consistently the highest-rated sessions in our post-conference surveys even though they're the hardest to recruit.
If you've never proposed a session before, don't let that stop you. The strongest proposals we've gotten in past years have come from first-time presenters describing something specific that happened at their own operation — a batch that failed and why, a supplier relationship that changed, a labeling question that took longer to resolve than expected. A generic "trends in artisan cheese" talk gets read; a talk with your actual numbers and your actual cave in it gets accepted.
Logistics, briefly
Proposals are due at the end of April, which gives the program committee time to build a schedule and give accepted presenters real lead time to prepare. Portland in July tends to book up on lodging near the venue faster than members expect, so if you're planning to attend regardless of whether you present, it's worth reserving a room in the next month or two rather than waiting until June.
The Events Committee is also fielding early questions about sponsorship tables and the competition schedule, both of which will get their own posts closer to the date. For now, the one thing we need from members is proposals — the submission form is on the conference page of the member portal, and the committee reads every one that comes in, whether or not it's ultimately accepted.
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.