Cheese Grading in Ireland & Beyond

Cheesemonger Shane courtesy of Sheridan's

Oftentimes cheesemongers ask: “What are the job prospects beyond the counter?” While many cheesemongers are happy to make a career behind a counter, many of them look for new jobs after a couple of years. The reasons for moving away from the counter are many and personal, but it is important to recognize that cheese mongering is a hard physical job that requires a certain level of stamina and enjoyment for customer relations.

Fortunately there are jobs that leverage the skills of a cheesemonger that aren’t behind a retail cheese counter.

Beyond Mongering

Jobs in cheese beyond the counter include Sales Representative, Brand Ambassador / Merchandiser, or Purchasing Manager. Those jobs are similar to mongering in terms of engagement to sell cheeses, however they differ in the audience. While sales reps and merchandisers are always on the road visiting stores, some jobs in purchasing require visiting producers. There are also some mongers who move to internal sales, taking orders, following leads, and investigating new potential accounts. They interact with corporate customers on the phone and email.

Cheese Grading

A job we don’t often hear about is Cheese Grader, maybe because those positions are few and far between nowadays, but in some countries these cheese professionals are key workers often involved in procurement and sales. In Ireland cheese grading has a long history. We talked to two graders in Ireland to learn more.

Grading for a Cheese Distributor

Gráinne Whalley grading Stilton

In the late 60s and early 1970s Eugene Carr worked for the Irish Dairy Board, where he helped set up a cheese grading system. A system that helped cheese producers market their products. He left the Irish Dairy Board, now Ornua to start a cheese distribution company called Traditional Cheese Company (TCC) based in Dublin. There he trained Gráinne Whalley, now Managing Director.

TCC, like many other companies around the world, sources cheeses from around Europe and sells them to restaurants, hotels, food service companies, and retailers. Gráinne explained that “Each of these markets will have their own specific requirements by cheese type and in terms of texture, body and flavour profile. For example, I have some customers that require additional ripening of Brie de Meaux to achieve a softer and creamier texture with rich earthy mushroom notes. Some customers like a Comte with fruit and savoury notes and aroma of fresh butter and hazelnuts. For others we will select a Comte produced from Summer Milk, aged for a minimum of 15 months to achieve a complexity of rich fruity, spicy & nutty flavours.” Read more about why Comte is the cheesemonger’s favorite cheese.

But perhaps the most important work that she does along her team is to select Cheddar from Irish producers. They select cheeses when they are about 3 months old and using the grading techniques created by Carr, they determine the markets and time they will mature each batch of cheese. Gráinne told us that their “traditional grading system combines visual, organoleptic, and physical assessment of the cheese.”

A lot of the work the TCC does is behind the scenes. “In 1999, TCC launched the first top tier private label cheese range in Ireland. This involved working very closely with 8 producers and Superquinn (an Irish Retailer who were very proactive) to ensure every cheese met the strict criteria which we set out. Producers ripened cheese under strict temperature and humidity controls to ensure only optimum quality of cheese was despatched. TCC introduced a weekly tasting of the cheese batch and each was signed off in terms of taste texture and flavour profile.”

Graders like those at the TCC are also involved with governmental projects, like the one organized by the College of Agriculture, Food & Rural Enterprise, where they have monthly Cheese Sensory Panel analysis to create standards for washed rind cheeses.

Gráinne told us that she keeps up to date by reading academic and scientific articles on flavor and tasting. She also encouraged us to pick up our copy of the Oxford Cheese Companion and study it.

Grading at a Dairy Cooperative

Nicola Beardmore grading Cheddar

Nicola Beardmore won the Young Cheesemonger of the Year competition in 2018, after working two years behind the counter in England. During the competition she saw judges at the tables of the Royal Bath and West Show accessing cheese and other foods. This experience made her think about other jobs in cheese and decided to look further into the industry. In 2019, she started a job as a cheese grader trainee for Ornua Foods UK. The second day at her new job she met Bruce Macdonald, a veteran cheese grader with 30+ years experience during a meeting of the now inactive Guild of Cheese Graders. Note: In the USA, Ornua is the parent company of brands like Kerrygold and Dubliner.

The meeting was foundational, she had to jump right into tasting cheeses unfamiliar to her. Most of the tasting consisted in accessing blocks of cheese and having discussions based on the point system created for Ornua. Her background was more on artisanal and traditional cheese made by small producers. Now she knows and recognizes that there are actually huge differences between cheeses and batches in those blocks. She spends a lot of time reading about the science of flavor development but knows that the most important part of her learning experience is listening and sharing with other grades.

Nicola described part of her work saying, “Grading itself isn’t ‘just eating cheese’, we have regular panels at work as well as supplier and customer visits (both on and off site) - tasting cheese itself does play a key part of this and is carefully managed. We have an external and internal team. The work of the internal team is to follow the specifications set by the customer, which follow a flavor profile agreed upon by the customer and our external team. The external team works in defining the flavor profile. All cheeses are tasted at 3 months old, and this is the moment when both the internal and external teams work together to make sure they are meeting the standards in place. We’ve been doing a lot of work with profiles to make sure the cheeses that go to customers are the very best they can be and are fit for purpose, for instance, our slicing cheeses are specially selected and many are made to certain recipes.”

She adds, that there is a lot of administration, every single cheese that comes into site gets logged on a database, and then they use other systems for stock management and ensuring traceability. “I also spent time at trade shows, as a young female in the industry it’s so important for me to be seen as having a job that is very meaningful in elevating the work of producers. Cheese making is extremely hard work, so being able to grade and make sure it really is perfect for customers is a huge honour and definitely a niche job.”

Cheese Grading for Individual Producers

Comté

Elsewhere, the job of grading is not completely codified, but when you start asking around you learn that a lot of the work done in the Fort St. Antoine to select Comté, or in the Gourmino cellars involves some type of sensory evaluation. We recently shared an article about the work of Kate Neumeier Clarke, CEO of Wisconsin Aging & Grading (WAG) and heard Alex Armstrong talk about his job at Jasper Hill Farms as Sensory Evaluator and Educator on Cutting the Curd.

Cheese grading, evaluation, and sensory analysis is used every day by many of us. Many of the judges at cheese competitions are experts in those techniques and we should encourage others to learn the tools of analysis to level up the selection of products.