Vegan cheese disqualified from prestigious food award
In the wine world, the 1976 Judgment of Paris — a blind taste test in which California chardonnays and Bordeauxs beat out their French counterparts — is remembered as the shocking upending of long-standing order.
A similar moment looked like it was coming to the demimonde of artisanal cheese. On Monday, the winners will be announced of the Good Food awards, a prestigious honor that considers both the quality of the products and the environmental and social consciousness of the companies that produce them.
When the California-based foundation that doles them out announced the finalists in January, among the candidates was a blue cheese from Climax Foods of Berkeley, Calif.
The difference between that entrant and its competitors wasn’t a silky mouthfeel or buttery flavor, but rather the fact that Climax Blue wasn’t made from the milk of cows or goats, but rather a blend of ingredients including pumpkin seeds, lima beans, hemp seeds, coconut fat and cocoa butter.
A plant-based “cheese” held up as an exemplar, in a blind tasting, among true dairy products? Traditional cheesemakers were shocked. As word spread about the interloper, mostly through food writer Janet Fletcher’s Planet Cheese newsletter, the dispute fomented.
The Good Foods Foundation at first offered a compromise solution: If, in fact, the Climax cheese was a winner, it announced, the foundation would name a co-winner. Then the foundation would reevaluate for next year, perhaps creating a new category or moving the cheese into the broader snacks cohort.
But behind the scenes, things were getting messy. Last week, the foundation quietly removed the Climax Blue from the list of finalists on its website but didn’t make public what had disqualified the cheese. It wasn’t the fact that it is plant-based, since those products are explicitly allowed. But it had never been an issue since a vegan cheese had never impressed the judges to be named a finalist.
When asked by The Washington Post about its reasoning, Good Foods Foundation executive director Sarah Weiner declined to say, but she said something similar had happened only three times in the awards’ 14-year history.
Weiner also wouldn’t say who tipped off the foundation about Climax. “I think there were a lot more eyes on this particular entrant than there would be on one of the hundreds of other finalists,” she said. “Which made it more likely that someone with expertise would reach out.”
Climax CEO Oliver Zahn accused the foundation of caving to pressure from dairy cheesemakers in revoking the award. And then he spilled the curds: Climax, wasn’t just a finalist — it was set to win the award, a fact that all parties are asked to keep confidential until the official ceremony but was revealed in an email the foundation sent to Climax in January. Based on that information, Zahn and his colleagues had planned to attend, booking hotel rooms and making travel plans, until, he says, learning from this reporter that his cheese was no longer in the running.
In the days leading up to the event, Climax and the Good Food Foundation offered differing versions of the circumstances around the rare award revocation. Zahn said the foundation made no attempt to reach the company to address potential questions, citing company email records.
Weiner said they emailed and called the person who had submitted the application — who they learned no longer works for Climax — and then emailed another employee with no response.
Zahn said he suspects that the person who lodged the complaint is an “informant” from the dairy cheese world who has been particularly outspoken. The substance of the complaint appeared to rest on the ingredient kokum butter — which is derived from the seeds of a kokum tree’s fruit — that Climax used in an earlier version of its cheese.
Kokum butter has not been designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration. Not all ingredients need a GRAS certification: The FDA grandfathers those that have common use in food.
Since then, though, the foundation added GRAS certification to its rules — a move Zahn says was a belated and clumsy attempt to disqualify him.
It isn’t clear when the foundation added the language, but an internet archive search showed that the new wording wasn’t there in January, after the finalists had been announced.