By Gordon Edgar—
Last month, I took some time away from Rainbow to attend the annual American Cheese Society (ACS) Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. When folks come into the store and ask me where I have been, and I respond “CheeseCon!” they seem to want to know more. Maybe you do too.
The American Cheese Society Conference includes three days of education, tasting, and cheesy camaraderie. Of course, I tasted lots of great cheeses—and I will write about those when they start coming into the store—but mostly what is so special about this conference is that, while it brings together cheese professionals from all over the hemisphere, it is more conference than trade show. The spirit is cooperative, and the mission is education; the idea being that sharing information benefits everyone in the cheese world.
This year, not for the first time, there was a lot of talk of environmental impacts of dairy and how to mitigate problems both for the survival of cheesemakers and survival of the planet. Probably my favorite panel was on building the future of grass-based dairy. Not only were the speakers Alice Melendez and Joe Tomandi tremendous, but also the Dairy Grazing Alliance seems to want to push forward a legal definition for grass-based dairy, something that has never existed before. It will take years, but as a cheesemonger who has to explain to customers why meat has a grass-based certification and dairy doesn’t, this is something I have wanted for years.
I also attended a great panel about Mexican and Mexican-style cheeses and the challenges they face on retail shelves. Two of the cheese makers we like—Quesos Navarro from Jalisco, Mexico, and Don Froylan Creamery from Oregon—discussed the quality problems they face getting their cheese to consumers with mongers unaccustomed to dealing with such fresh cheeses and styles that non-Latine stores don’t know enough about.
Possibly the most fun panel I went to was getting a guided tour of the panelist’s visit to cheese caves in the U.S. Olivia Haver won a Daphne Zepos Teaching Endowment award to spend a year researching different operations. I have been to a lot of cheese rooms and cheese caves over the years, but even I got to see pictures and hear stories of a few places I have never been to before. Like most of the panels, cooperation was stressed. When you do something very uncommon on this continent—like building or converting a cave for cheese aging—you have to talk to some of the other few people who do it as well.
Lastly, I got to attend a workshop on British cheddars. The idea, about nine months ago, was to get a bunch of the traditional cheddar makers together and make a few vats of cheese using the same milk, but using different traditional methods to see what would happen. To be honest, it was a little early to taste and draw huge conclusions, but the workshop has already been instructive for the cheesemakers themselves.
Cheesemaking can be an isolated job, geographically speaking, and many of the makers were surprised to find out that not everyone took the same steps to produce what is considered to be the same style of cheese. This kind of cross-pollination by people who, in other industries, would be considered rivals is what makes the ACS conference so special. And, as someone who wrote a book about the history of American cheddar, I can tell you that these moments of communication have big impacts historically speaking. They are why cheddar was the most popular cheese in the U.S. for 150 years.
Gathering together has value in a lot of ways and one of the things that came out of the conference was a new Queer Cheese Guilde. The Guilde is still in the process of forming, but their statement post-conference was, “The goal of the Queer Cheese Guilde is to give safe space, power, and voice to those like us who are looking to build community in an ever-growing industry.” If you are a cheese professional, you can find their Instagram page under that name and check it out.
I am glad to be back in San Francisco, but I think you can see why the conference is always a highlight of my cheese year.
Gordon Edgar loves cheese and worker co-ops and has been combining these infatuations as the cheese buyer for Rainbow Grocery Cooperative since 1994. He serves on the American Cheese Society Judging and Competition Committee and is a member of the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers. Edgar has written two books on cheese—”Cheesemonger” (2010) and “Cheddar” (2015)—and lives in San Francisco with his adorable white mini schnauzer named Fillmore Grumble. He writes about grief, and sometimes cheese, at https://bit.ly/42IwYf0
Over the Rainbow Cheese Counter
Published on October 13, 2026
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