We moved the Certified Cheesemonger exam online in the fall of last year because we didn't have a choice — regional testing sites were closed, and a credential candidates had already been studying toward for months couldn't just go on indefinite hold. What surprised us is that a year later, with in-person sessions back on the calendar in a few cities, more candidates are still asking to sit the exam remotely than to travel for it.
The remote format is closer to the in-person one than people expect. It's still timed, still proctored — now by video instead of a room monitor — and still built around the same core sections: identification, affinage and handling, pairing and service, and a short written component on food-safety basics for a retail counter. What changed is the overhead. A candidate in a rural creamery three hours from the nearest testing site used to have to plan a travel day around a two-hour exam. Now they need a laptop, a quiet room, and a stable connection.
What's held up, and what hasn't
The written and identification sections translate cleanly to a screen. The section that's been hardest to adapt is the practical tasting component, where a proctor in the room can watch technique in a way a camera angle sometimes misses — how someone handles a knife on a bloomy rind, whether they're checking a paste correctly before scoring it. We've had candidates re-sit that portion because the camera angle didn't show what the proctor needed to see, which is frustrating for everyone and not really anyone's fault.
Our Education Committee has been working through what a permanent hybrid model should look like: written and identification sections available remotely on a rolling basis, with the practical component staying in-person at a handful of regional sites a few times a year. Nothing's finalized, but if you're planning to sit for Certified Cheesemonger this year, it's worth checking the member portal before you book travel — the schedule for the remaining sessions is being updated as the format settles.
If you're deciding whether to start
The credential itself hasn't gotten easier or harder because of the format change — the standard is the standard. What's changed is who can reasonably get to it. If distance from a testing city has kept you from starting the Certified Cheesemonger track, this is a better year than most to reconsider. The prep materials on the portal work the same either way, and a study group doesn't need to be in the same room to be useful — several of ours this spring have been entirely over video, which turned out fine.
If you're already partway through and unsure which sections you've cleared under which format, the Education Committee can pull your record and tell you exactly what's left.
We'd rather be honest about the tradeoffs than oversell the format. A remote sitting saves a candidate travel time and lodging costs, and it's let members from parts of the country with no nearby testing site attempt the credential at all this year — that alone has been worth the growing pains. But it also asks more of the candidate's home setup than most people expect the first time: a proctor will ask you to pan the camera around the room before you start, and more than one candidate has had to reschedule because a shared kitchen table wasn't private enough, or a connection dropped mid-section. If you're planning to sit remotely, treat the setup check as seriously as the studying. Borrow a quiet office for the morning if your usual workspace won't hold up, and test your camera and connection the day before rather than the hour before.
The same shift has shown up across our course catalog more broadly this year, not just at the certification stage. Course enrollment has stayed well above where it sat before the pandemic even as travel to in-person sessions has started to pick back up, which tells us the online option isn't just a stopgap members are tolerating until things return to normal — for a real share of our membership, it's simply become how they'd rather learn. We don't expect that to reverse once every regional testing site reopens, and we're planning the certification program's future around that assumption rather than against it.
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.