An assistant cheesemaker at Larkhollow Creamery joined the federation a little over a year ago, mostly because her head cheesemaker asked her to sit in on a food-safety webinar and never quite let her stop attending things after that. This month she's driving down for her first ICF Annual Conference, with a car full of samples and a notebook she's already half filled with questions she wants answered in person.
"I've been to exactly zero conferences in my life," she told us, "so I don't really know what I'm walking into. I know there's a competition and I know there are sessions, and past that I'm going in blind." That's a fair description of the event for a lot of first-timers, and it's worth saying plainly what four days in Asheville actually looks like from the ground: long mornings of sessions split by track, an exhibit floor thick with suppliers and distributors, a competition hall that gets busier as the week goes on, and evenings where the real conversations tend to happen over a shared cheese board rather than in a session room.
What she's packing
Her plan is to bring a small selection of the creamery's washed-rind wheels for informal tasting, on the theory that a conference full of cheesemakers is the best possible room to get honest feedback in. She's also bringing a list, compiled with her head cheesemaker's help, of specific things to look for on the floor: a supplier who might solve a packaging problem they've been putting off, and two sessions on affinage technique that align with a wheel they've been struggling to get consistent.
Her advice to anyone else attending for the first time is unglamorous and probably right: don't try to see everything. "I picked three things I actually need answers on, and I'm going to spend the rest of the time just talking to people and tasting cheese I didn't make." She's also planning to stop by the Education Committee's table to ask about a credential path — she's eyeing the Sensory Evaluation Certificate for next year, now that she's got a year of membership and a conference under her belt.
If you're going too
Early registration for this year's conference has closed, but on-site registration will still be available in Asheville, and members who haven't locked in travel yet still have a little time. If this is your first year attending, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding first-timer questions all month — logistics, what to bring for informal tastings, how the competition schedule works — and would rather you ask ahead of time than figure it out standing in a hallway.
A few things worth knowing if this is your first conference, from members who've done it before: bring more business cards than you think you'll need, because the exhibit floor moves fast and you will run out. Wear shoes you can stand in for eight hours, because the floor is concrete and the day is long. And don't skip the informal tastings in favor of only the scheduled sessions — some of the best technical conversations at any conference happen over a cheese board at nine at night, not in a session room at nine in the morning.
It's also worth saying that the appetite for this kind of in-person gathering has come back stronger than a lot of members expected. Attendance at industry trade shows and conferences generally has climbed back toward pre-2020 levels this year, and our own early registration numbers for Asheville are running ahead of the last in-person conference before the pause. Whatever brought you into membership, a first conference is usually where it stops being an abstraction and starts being a room full of people who understand exactly what your week looks like.
If you haven't already, stop by the Awards & Competition Committee's table once you're on-site — even if you're not entering this year, watching how entries are staged and judged is one of the fastest ways to understand what the judges are actually looking for. And if a course or credential catches your interest in a session, the Education Committee will have someone at the registration desk all four days who can walk you through prerequisites on the spot. We'll see a lot of you there in a few days.
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.