Cheese judging and grading are important activities performed by the cheese industry, but both play very different roles.

Making cheese without any automation is a back-breaking, tiring job with a lot of stooping, stirring, manual washing of hoops and so on. When it comes to automation, “zero is not a hero,” for Master Cheesemaker Chris Renard and the team who handle production and packaging for Renard’s Cheese factory in Algoma, Wis.

When something is “grand,” it denotes something “magnificent, the largest/most important item of its kind.”

More than 2,700 cheese industry professionals explored over 320 tabletop exhibits, learned from the industry's brightest minds, and celebrated excellence in dairy processing during CheeseCon 2023 held April 5-6 at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wis.

A soft goat’s cheese made by Andalusian cheesemaker Quesos y Besos was named World Champion Cheese in the World Cheese Awards in Oviedo, Spain, on Nov. 3.