In mid-July, judges in Louisville worked their way through roughly 1,600 cheeses and cultured dairy products and handed eight medals — plus the competition’s top individual honor for an American Original — back to a single creamery in Thorp, Wisconsin. For Marieke Gouda, that’s not a breakout moment; it’s one more entry in a career award count that has now passed 325, built up one competition at a time since the creamery’s first batch twenty years ago. Here’s the story behind this year’s haul, and what two decades of it reveals about what makes artisan cheese worth seeking out.
A Dutch Farm Woman Gets Homesick in Thorp
Marieke Penterman grew up on a dairy farm in the Netherlands, where cheesemaking isn’t a specialty craft so much as a fact of daily life. In 1998, an internship in Canada put her in the path of Rolf Penterman, who was already planning to leave Europe and build his own dairy operation in the United States. Rolf arrived in Wisconsin first and set up a farm outside the small town of Thorp. Marieke followed in December 2003, trading a country with a thousand-year cheese tradition for a stretch of central Wisconsin farmland.
What she couldn’t find nearby was real gouda. The cheese she’d grown up eating: aged, nutty, made the way her family and neighbors back home had always made it. Rather than live without it, she decided to make it herself. That decision, more than any single ingredient or technique, is why Marieke Gouda exists — the same instinct behind much of the best artisan cheese in this country, where a maker’s homesickness or stubbornness usually explains more than any business plan.
Learning Gouda the Old Way
Wanting authentic gouda and knowing how to make it are two different problems, and Marieke didn’t pretend the first solved the second. She returned to the Netherlands and apprenticed under working cheesemakers, deliberately choosing operations of very different sizes — some milking as few as ten cows, others running herds of two hundred. That range mattered. Small-scale makers taught her how gouda behaves when a cheesemaker can taste and adjust every vat by hand; larger operations taught her how to maintain that same quality as volume increases. In November 2006, back in Wisconsin, she made her first batch of gouda on American soil, using milk from the family farm.
It’s worth sitting with how deliberately old-fashioned that path was. Marieke could have bought equipment, followed a recipe card, and started selling cheese within months. Instead, she spent real time re-learning a craft from people who already knew it, in the country where it was invented. Twenty years later, in 2026, that patience is part of what Marieke Gouda is now trading on — the American Cheese Society and outlets covering this year’s results have repeatedly framed the company’s award run as two decades of craft, not a single good batch.
One Farm, One Wheel: From Milk to Aging Room
What separates Marieke Gouda from many small cheesemakers is control. The milk comes from the Pentermans’ own herd, a short walk from the make room, which means Marieke isn’t buying milk from a co-op and hoping the fat and protein content lines up with what her recipe needs that week. In 2013, she and Rolf opened a dedicated production facility in Thorp with a farm store, a café, and viewing windows so visitors can watch the cheese being made. Milking, making, aging, cutting, and selling all happen inside one operation — a level of vertical integration that most creameries this size simply don’t have the scale or capital to attempt.
In 2024, that expertise received a formal stamp: Marieke became a Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker, a certification that takes years of additional training and testing on top of an already-licensed cheesemaking career, and one that fewer than a couple hundred people worldwide currently hold. She was only the fourth woman to earn it since the program began. It’s the kind of credential that doesn’t show up in a tasting note but shows up everywhere else — in how consistent a gouda tastes from one wheel to the next, three years apart.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before in Wisconsin’s cheese scene this year — see our profile of Blakesville Creamery’s award-winning Artze — where tight control over sourcing and a specialist’s patience mattered more than scale.
Nine Awards in Louisville
The 2026 American Cheese Society Judging & Competition drew close to 1,600 entries across more than 100 categories, all judged blind on flavor, aroma, texture, appearance, and craftsmanship by some of the industry’s most experienced palates. Marieke Gouda didn’t just place — it placed across nearly its whole product line, taking eight medals plus the competition’s top individual honor for an American Original.
None of that happened in isolation. By the creamery’s own count, this year’s results push its career total past 325 awards since Marieke made her first batch in 2006 — a business that wins competitions as routine, not a company having one exceptional year.
In the Dutch-style class for cheeses aged up to nine months, Marieke Gouda earned a silver medal for its Belegen (four to six months) and a bronze for the young Gouda (two to four months). In the longer-aged Dutch-style class, the twelve-to-eighteen-month Premium Gouda took gold. Among cold-pack and club cheeses with added flavor, the Hatch Pepper Spread won gold and the Honey Clover Spread took silver. In the Original Recipe / Open Category for cow’s milk — the class ACS uses for distinctly American styles — Marieke Golden swept all three placements: gold for the mature wheel, silver for the aged, and bronze for the young. That’s three gold, three silver, and two bronze medals in total, according to the American Cheese Society’s official 2026 winner list.
The gold-medal Marieke Golden Mature also earned the Highest Scoring American Original Award, the competition’s special recognition for the top-scoring cheese among all the distinctly American styles entered that year. Coverage of the results also placed Marieke Gouda among the competition’s Top 11 highest-scoring cheeses overall — short of the final Best of Show podium, which this year went to Jasper Hill Farm’s Winnimere, but still a genuine distinction out of roughly 1,600 entries.
“Being recognized by the American Cheese Society is an incredible honor,” Marieke Penterman said after the results were announced, “because it comes from some of the most knowledgeable and respected experts in our industry.” The full category-by-category results are in the American Cheese Society’s official 2026 winner list. Background on the award announcement is in PR Newswire’s release, and this year’s overall Best of Show is covered in the American Cheese Society’s own announcement.
What’s Actually Driving the Winning Streak
It’s tempting to credit a run like this to a good year, but the pattern points to something more specific. Four things stand out.
First, vertical integration removes a variable most small creameries can’t control: milk quality and consistency. When the herd, the make room, and the aging cave belong to the same operation, a cheesemaker can pursue precision in ways that buying milk on the open market doesn’t allow.
Second, the training was never a shortcut. Marieke apprenticed at both ends of the spectrum in the Netherlands before she produced a single commercial batch, and she continued building credentials for twenty years afterward, culminating in the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker title in 2024. That’s a very different path from a hobbyist who scales up quickly.
Third, the product line stayed narrow and got deeper instead of wider. Marieke Gouda didn’t chase every trend in the flavored-cheese aisle; it built out variations on one style — young, semi-aged Belegen, long-aged Golden and Premium, plus a couple of spreads — and refined each one over two decades. Judges rewarding entries across nearly the whole lineup, not just one hero product, is a strong signal that the whole system is dialed in, not just a single recipe.
Fourth, and maybe least obvious: this is a genuinely cross-cultural product. Marieke didn’t just import a Dutch recipe and drop it into Wisconsin—she paired Dutch technique with the scale, feed quality, and dairy infrastructure Wisconsin’s dairy industry has spent a century building. That combination deserves more attention from anyone thinking about the business side of artisan cheese; we go deeper on how small creameries scale without losing what makes them artisan in Artisanal Cheese Business: Growth, Challenges, and Solutions.
Bringing Marieke Gouda to Your Table
If you haven’t tasted the lineup, the age progression is the easiest way to understand what the judges were responding to. The young, two- to four-month Gouda is mild and milky, closer to a fresh cheese than an aged one—good melted on a sandwich or eaten plain. Belegen, aged to the semi-firm range, picks up a nuttier, slightly caramelized edge. The long-aged styles, Golden and Premium, develop small, crunchy tyrosine crystals and butterscotch notes that mark a serious aged Gouda, the kind worth pairing with a dark beer, a crisp apple, or a smear of grainy mustard on rye.
The Hatch Pepper and Honey Clover spreads are a gentler entry point if aged cheese isn’t your usual pick—both are built to go straight onto a cracker or onto a cheese board. For more ideas on what to pair with a wedge of Gouda, start with our guide to cheese and fruit pairings. Marieke Gouda sells directly from its farm store and café in Thorp, and Whole Foods, Kroger, and Publix also carry the cheese in most regions, along with the company’s online store.
Why This Story Is Worth Telling
Nine awards are a headline number, but the more useful takeaway is what produced them: a founder who refused to cut corners in her training, a business built to control quality from the field to the wheel, and two decades of narrowing focus rather than chasing every new idea. That’s a repeatable formula, not a stroke of luck — and it’s exactly the kind of maker story we want Nahitra to keep telling as the go-to resource for artisan cheese, whether you’re shopping for a wedge to bring to dinner or building a business around one yourself.
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