One of our specialty retail members told us this spring that she'd caught herself doing something she wasn't proud of: reaching for the same three or four producer names whenever a distributor sent over a new list of submissions, and barely tasting the rest before passing on them. "I knew the names that sold," she said. "I didn't realize how much that had replaced actually tasting the cheese."
So she changed her process. Every submission that comes across her desk now gets cut, plated, and tasted with the producer name covered, alongside two or three others in the same style. Only after she's ranked them does she uncover who made what.
What blind tasting turned up
The results surprised her. A washed-rind wheel from a producer she'd never stocked came out ahead of one of her long-standing suppliers in a head-to-head she ran in April, and she says it wasn't close. "If I'd seen the name first, I'd have picked the familiar one out of habit and never known I was wrong." She's since added the new producer to her case and quietly trimmed volume from one of her regulars, which she admits was an uncomfortable conversation to have.
It hasn't all gone one direction. A couple of her longtime suppliers held up fine blind, which she says was reassuring rather than surprising — she'd stocked them for a reason, and the reason turned out to be the cheese, not just the relationship. The exercise didn't tell her to distrust every producer she already knew. It told her which of her habits were actually judgment and which were just momentum.
Buyers who've never done a blind pass sometimes assume it's mostly useful for catching an overrated favorite. She says the more common outcome in her own notebook has been the opposite — confirming that a supplier she'd started to take for granted was still earning the shelf space, which turned out to matter just as much for how she talks to that supplier at renewal time.
What she'd tell other buyers
Her advice for other retail and wholesale buyers is to try it for one ordering cycle before deciding it's not worth the extra step. "Cut it, cover the label, taste it next to something similar, and write your notes before you look." She keeps a simple notebook now — style, texture, a one-line note, then the reveal — and says the habit has made her faster at spotting a genuinely strong new entrant, which matters more this year with wholesale prices sliding and margins tighter across the board for everyone in her supply chain.
She's also found the notebook useful for a conversation she used to dread: telling a longtime supplier that a newer wheel had outscored theirs. "I used to soften that kind of thing so much it didn't land," she said. "Now I can show them the actual notes, blind, side by side, and it's not a personal judgment — it's just what the panel wrote down before anyone knew whose cheese it was." She says most suppliers respond better to a specific note about texture or balance than to a vague sense that something didn't sell.
If you buy for a shop or a program and want to try a version of this, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to members who've built their own blind-tasting routines, and our Building a Tasting Vocabulary course covers the basic scoring framework she borrowed to get started.
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.