The ICF Annual Conference lands in Asheville this year on 19 July, and with it comes the flagship competition that most members think of first when they picture the federation: rows of wheels under table lamps, judges working their way down a bench with a knife and a scorecard. Getting onto that bench isn't automatic, and this is a good week to start thinking about it if you want a seat there next year, or the year after.
Elsewhere in the country, a large national cheese judging event just wrapped up its own two days of scoring, at a scale that would surprise anyone who thinks of competition judging as a small, quiet room. Ours is smaller, but the mechanics are the same: a panel trained to score consistently, working from a shared vocabulary of faults and virtues, so two judges tasting the same wheel on opposite ends of a table land on roughly the same number.
The two credentials
The route onto that panel runs through two of our seven credentials. The Sensory Evaluation Certificate comes first: structured tasting, defect identification, and scoring against style standards. It's the certificate that teaches you to say why a wheel earned the score it did, not just whether you liked it. Most members who take it are surprised by how much of it is vocabulary — learning to name a fault precisely enough that another judge, reading your notes later, would score the same wheel the same way. A rind that's gone slippery in the wrong way needs a specific word, not just "off."
The Competition Judge Accreditation sits on top of that. It requires the sensory certificate plus supervised panel experience — working a bench alongside an accredited judge before you're cleared to score on your own. It's also the credential in our whole ladder that lapses fastest without active use, which is worth knowing if you earned it a few cycles back and haven't judged since a pre-pandemic conference. A quiet year or two on the bench and you may be back to shadowing before you sit again, even with the certificate still technically on file.
Why this week specifically
Panels for Asheville get built through June, and the coordinating committee likes to know who's coming before the entry period opens in earnest. If you already hold the sensory certificate, this is the moment to ask the Awards & Competition Committee about supervised hours. If you don't, the certificate itself is not a long program, and there's no prerequisite beyond an interest in tasting critically instead of just enthusiastically.
Neither credential requires you to be a cheesemaker, either. Some of the sharpest panelists we've had over the years came up through retail counters or distribution, where tasting dozens of wheels a week builds a different kind of pattern recognition than making one style very well for a decade. If your case, not your cave, is where you spend your days, you're not disqualified from this ladder — you may be better suited to it than you think, since you've likely already trained your palate on more varied cheese than most single-style producers ever taste.
Milk prices have stayed unusually high again this spring, and a few members have asked us privately whether a competition entry is worth the ingredient cost this year. That's a real question and one only you can answer for your own books. But judging doesn't carry that cost, and the bench is short on hands most years. If Asheville is already on your calendar, consider showing up a day early and putting your palate to work instead of just your appetite.
Members interested in either credential should contact the Awards & Competition Committee, which keeps the current schedule for supervised panel slots ahead of the July conference.
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.