Vermont Cheese Wheels Landed in Minnesota to Compete for their Makers.
Forty-two judges, 1,600 entries, 139 categories. By Friday, Vermont finds out whether it repeats last year's 49-ribbon haul.
The American Cheese Society’s annual Judging & Competition is underway this week at Huntington Bank Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis — five days of blind tasting, May 18 through May 22, that will sort more than 1,600 cheeses from over 200 producers into 139 categories and, on the last day, name one Best of Show.
The makers themselves aren’t there. Their cheese is.
Vermont sent work from 15 cheesemakers to last year’s competition in Sacramento. Nine of them — Boston Post Dairy, Cabot Creamery Cooperative, Fat Sheep Farm, Grafton Village Cheese, Jasper Hill Farm, Shelburne Farms, Spring Brook Farm, von Trapp Farmstead, and Vermont Creamery — came home with ribbons. Counting two additional collaborations involving Wegmans Food Stores and Murray’s Cheese in New York, the state took 49 ribbons in all.
How a state of roughly 647,000 people sustains that performance is a question with a real economic answer. Vermont’s dairy industry has spent two decades watching commodity milk prices squeeze small farms. Cheese — particularly the artisan and farmstead varieties that dominate the ACS categories — is the value-add escape hatch. A pound of milk shipped as raw fluid to a regional processor competes on a national pricing board the producer doesn’t set. A pound of milk turned into aged cheddar with a ribbon on it competes on a shelf in Brooklyn against bottled water and craft beer.
The Vermont Cheese Council has been moving deliberately to keep that pipeline full. VCC reimburses its members for ACS entry fees up to a set amount, treating the cost as a marketing investment rather than a producer expense. The program is small in dollar terms and large in visibility return: every ribbon is an out-of-state shelf-placement argument and a price-premium justification.
The Best of Show award at the 2025 competition went to Fromagerie la Station in Compton, Québec, for a farmstead cheese called Alfred le Fermier — a reminder that the ACS field includes Canadian and Mexican producers, and that Vermont’s haul comes despite, not because of, the international competition.
Results from the 2026 competition will be announced Wednesday, July 8, at the ACS annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference theme: “Stitched Together by Cheese.”
By Friday afternoon in Minneapolis, the judging will be done. The cheese will know how it did. The makers — still home, still making more — will find out in July.