How To Become A Certified Cheese Professional

It is easy for someone to call themselves a cheese expert, but to actually become certified as one, they need to undergo a great deal of training and experience. You don’t necessarily need to be a certified cheese professional in order to be an expert in the field, but it helps confirm your knowledge so everyone else knows that you aware of all the details concerning cheese.

Certified Cheese Professional Exam

The way to officially become a certified cheese professional is to take the exam offered by the American Cheese Society (ACS). Their exam is known as the Certified Cheese Professional Exam (CCPE) and is actually the only examination of this type. When you pass the exam, you receive the title of ACS CCP, which stands for ACS Certified Cheese Professional. The certification exam lasts three hours and involves 150 different multiple choice questions that cover all the knowledge a cheese expert would need to know, including items that most people would not necessarily see as related to the profession.

Requirements

Before taking the exam, you have to prove that you are eligible to take it. You have to have either completed high school or earned your GED in order to show basic literacy skills. Additionally, you need to have 4,000 hours of documentable work (paid or unpaid) that is directly related to the cheese profession within the previous six years. It is possible to have 2,000 hours from the cheese profession and 2,000 hours from professional development, continuing education, and formal education. The ACS lists acceptable work experience for this requirement as being: cheese manufacturing or making, cheese commerce or sales, writing related to cheese, professional teaching or consultation, being a cheese educator, and managing cheese (or working with it extensively) in a restaurant or food store.

Information You Need To Know

There is a vast amount of information that you need to know in order to pass the cheese examination. This includes nine different categories: regulations and regulators, cheese service, cheese evaluation and assessment, cheese categories and types, merchandising and marketing cheese, cheese transportation and storage, cheese ripening, processes of cheesemaking, and raw materials needed for cheesemaking.

Other Options

If you do not want to go through the entire process of becoming a certified cheese professional, but want some sort of certification, there are also various short certification programs that you can take, such as master classes and intensive cheese education programs. These certifications have fewer requirements, but also require much less time to achieve.