Among festival guests — “The cheese that changed me”

The Kyiv Food & Wine Festival hosted Ukraine’s first artisan cheese competition of a new format — “The Cheese That Changed Me.” What makes this competition unique is that the winners are determined not by a jury, but by the festival guests themselves, through personal stories shared on social media.

About the Competition

“The Cheese That Changed Me” is a new format for supporting and promoting Ukrainian artisan cheesemaking, where live consumer experience becomes the main evaluation tool. A festival guest buys a cheese, records a story or publishes a post sharing their personal experience with the product, and tags the page of the Association of Ukrainian Artisan Cheesemakers as well as the cheesemaker.

Award Categories

The “Cheese that changed me” competition is more than just a contest. It is a tool for promoting Ukrainian artisan cheesemaking through authentic consumer stories. At a time when Ukrainian producers need greater visibility and support, this format allowed every festival guest to become an ambassador for a specific cheesemaker and their product.

In recent years, the number of artisan cheese producers in Ukraine has grown significantly. At the same time, consumers are often unaware that local producers exist. The competition builds a living bridge between cheesemaker and buyer — through personal emotion and social media.

The competition was jointly organized by:

• Association of cheese producers of Ukraine (ACPU) — an industry organization uniting Ukrainian artisan cheesemakers and protecting their interests
• Kyiv Food & Wine Festival — one of Ukraine’s leading gastronomic festivals
• Tetyana Dyadechko’s Cheesemaking School — an educational platform in the field of cheesemaking

The competition was made with support of Switzerland within the framework of the Swiss-Ukrainian Programme “Higher Value Added Trade from the Organic and Dairy Sector in Ukraine” (QFTP) implemented by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL, Switzerland) in partnership with SAFOSO AG (Switzerland) .

Organizers’ Comment

“We wanted to create a competition where the main judge is a person holding a piece of cheese in their hand. Not an academic jury, not a scoring system, but genuine emotion and an honest story. Because that is exactly how love for an artisan product is born”