Illustration only: the cheeses pictured are not award winners.
An award can empty a creamery’s aging room in a few weeks, or come and go without a ripple. The difference is rarely the cheese. It’s what the creamery has ready when the results are announced. Here’s what a medal really changes for a small creamery, what it leaves untouched, and a simple playbook for catching the rush.
Why One Medal Can Empty a Cave
In October 2019, a blue cheese from southern Oregon did something no American cheese had done before. At the World Cheese Awards in Bergamo, Italy, Rogue Creamery’s Rogue River Blue was named World Champion Cheese, beating 3,804 entries from 42 countries. Within weeks, owner David Gremmels told The New York Times that web traffic and sales were up 500 percent. London shops, such as Neal’s Yard Dairy, ordered more, and new buyers called from Spain and the Netherlands.
The demand didn’t fade with the headlines. Two years later, one small shop owner told reporters that the cheese had sold out in a few weeks the previous season, so she was doubling her order. That’s the dream version of an award, and it’s real.
It’s also the ceiling. Rogue had a larger parent company, Savencia Cheese USA, behind it, and a world title is the rarest prize in cheese. Most medals land more quietly: a ribbon at the American Cheese Society, a gold in a category at the World Championship Cheese Contest, a regional win. The useful question for a small creamery isn’t whether an award can change everything. It’s what a typical award actually changes, and what you need in place to catch it.
What an Award Actually Changes
Buyers start looking for you
The clearest effect is that people come looking. When Marieke Penterman won Grand Champion at the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest, her company sold out of stock and had to start taking preorders for the winning aged Gouda. She has said the media attention brought a better return than any advertising a small operation like hers could buy. Her story is a big part of why we profiled Marieke Gouda after its nine 2026 ACS awards.
Smaller wins move the needle too. After Sweet Grass Dairy’s Thomasville Tomme won a SOFI Gold in 2017, cheesemaker Jeremy Little said sales of that cheese had never been stronger. This year, the same Georgia creamery took first place at ACS for its Green Hill, which we covered in our Sweet Grass Dairy spotlight.
A medal is borrowed trust
Picture a shopper at a cheese counter facing forty wheels they’ve never tasted. They can’t try them all. A medal gives them a reason to choose yours and gives the cheesemonger a one-line story to tell. That borrowed trust matters most to people who don’t know you yet: a new retailer, a restaurant buyer, or a gift shopper in another state.
The realistic version of this is modest. When Crooked Face Creamery in Maine won a Super Gold at the World Cheese Awards for its ricotta, owner Amy Rowbottom said she hoped to grow her gift box sales from 75 to 200 that season and soften the usual slowdown after New Year’s. That’s what an award looks like for most small makers. It doesn’t replace the business. It gives it a lift at a useful moment.
Room to revisit your price
There’s no solid study on how medals affect cheese prices, but wine has one. Economists who studied Bordeaux producers selling to wholesale traders found that a medal let producers charge about 13 percent more. The same research found that only a minority of contests carried real weight with buyers, mostly older competitions whose judges taste fewer samples per day.
Cheese isn’t wine, so treat that number as a hint, not a promise. The lesson that does carry over is this: the contest matters, and an award is a good time to take a hard look at your pricing. If you’ve been underpricing a cheese that judges just ranked among the best in its class, our guide on how to price artisanal cheese for profit walks through the math.
Feedback you can’t get anywhere else
Even entries that don’t place come back with something useful. The big technical competitions return scores and judges’ notes, providing expert feedback a small creamery rarely gets otherwise. Wisconsin cheesemaker Chris Roelli, who won ACS Best of Show in 2016, has said a big win is especially useful to the people in marketing and product development. The ribbon sells cheese, and the score sheet makes the next batch better.
What an Award Doesn’t Change
You can’t make more aged cheese overnight
This is the hard part. Rogue River Blue is produced seasonally and cave-aged for nine to eleven months. When demand jumped, there was no way to make more of that vintage. The same goes for any aged cheese. The wheels you can sell this winter were made a year or more ago, so an award can sell out your cave in a few weeks and leave you waiting months for the next batch.
Hook’s Cheese in Wisconsin knows this well. When the Hooks released their first 20-year cheddar in 2015, about 450 pounds sold out in five days. Scarcity can work in your favor, as Hook’s later preorder releases show, but only if you plan for it.
The work grows faster than the team
More orders mean more packing, more shipping, more customer emails, and more chances a box will arrive warm. A creamery that ships a dozen orders a week can’t jump to a hundred without strain. If shipping is new to you, our guide to shipping cheese across state lines covers the rules and the cold chain before the rush hits.
The spotlight moves on
Attention fades. The press cycle lasts weeks, and next year new winners will emerge. Roelli put it plainly: contests are useful, but they are unlikely to make or break a local cheesemaker. The customer still decides. A medal opens a door, but what keeps people coming back is the cheese and how easy it is to buy from you.
The Conversion Problem
Here is where many small creameries lose the award window without noticing. The rush of attention arrives wherever people can find you: on your website, on your Instagram, or in a search for your cheese’s name. If that path ends with “email us to order” or a phone number, some of those people will leave.
That isn’t a criticism. Taking orders by email or phone works well for regulars who already know you, and many respected creameries still sell that way. It works less well for someone who read about your win at 9 p.m. and wants to buy a gift right now. They don’t know you yet, and they won’t wait for a reply.
So, the question to ask before results come out is simple: if a thousand new people find you tomorrow, how many of them can actually buy? We looked at the options in what small creameries actually need from an online marketplace, from your own web store to shared platforms.
A Three-Stage Playbook for Your Award Window
Before the results come out
Start the day you ship your entries. Set aside some inventory of each cheese you enter so a win doesn’t leave you with nothing to sell. Make sure there’s a clear way to buy online, even a simple one. Draft a wholesale price sheet with your minimums and lead times, so you can answer a distributor the same day they call. Have good photos and a short fact sheet ready for each cheese you enter: milk type, age, how it’s made, and where it’s sold.
The first 30 days
Tell the people who already sell your cheese first. Your retailers and restaurant partners can put the news on the shelf that week, and they’ll appreciate hearing it from you. Then share it everywhere you have an audience and send a short note to your local paper and to trade outlets that cover your region.
Before you print anything, review the organizer’s rules for using medal artwork and award wording on labels and packaging. Rules differ from one competition to the next, and some limit the medal to the exact cheese and year that won. A quick check now saves a reprint later.
The year after
Review your score sheets, including the ones for cheeses that didn’t place. Decide which cheese is worth pushing, and enter it again. Keep your claims precise. “First place, 2026 American Cheese Society, Brie-style” means more to a buyer than a vague “award-winning,” and it stays honest as the years pass.
Is Entering Worth the Cost?
The entry fee is the easy part to see. Here’s what the main competitions charge, based on their most recent published rates:
| Competition | Entry fee | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| American Cheese Society Judging & Competition | $75 per entry early bird, $100 regular (2025 rates) | Annual. Open only to ACS organizational members. Call for entries |
| World Championship Cheese Contest | $80 per entry early, $95 after (2026 rates) | Held every two years in Wisconsin; the 2026 contest was judged in March. 2026 entry details. The next is the 2028 contest. |
| World Cheese Awards | Covered for some U.S. entries in 2026 | The U.S. Dairy Export Council paid entry costs for the first 100 U.S. cow’s-milk or mixed-milk cheeses, up to five per company. USDEC details |
The fee is only part of the cost. Add ACS membership dues if you enter, the cheese you send for judging, cold shipping, and your time. Entering three cheeses at the ACS early-bird rate is $225 before any of those extras. Help is available, too. Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin reimburses part of the entry and shipping costs for Wisconsin cheesemakers, and the U.S. Dairy Export Council has covered World Cheese Awards entries for U.S. makers.
So is it worth it? For a creamery with a cheese it believes in and a way to sell to cheese lovers, usually yes. The wine research found that the payoff from entering credible contests is high. The bigger risk isn’t the fee. It’s winning and having nothing ready.
Win the Medal, Then Win the Week
An award can bring buyers to your door, earn cheese lovers’ trust, and give you room to rethink your pricing. It can’t age cheese faster, add hands to your packing table, or keep the spotlight on you for long. The creameries that get the most from a medal are the ones that prepared before the results came out: inventory set aside, wholesale terms drafted, and a simple way for a new customer to buy.
The next big moment is near. The 2026 World Cheese Awards will be judged in Córdoba, Spain, on November 12, and any American winners there could wake up to a very busy week. If you’d like a ready-made way for new customers to buy direct from your creamery when that moment comes, Nahitra is now recruiting founding sellers for its marketplace.
