The first round of the American Ice Cream Awards will have state level winners. The deadline for entry submission will be announced soon. The estimated time of the deadline will be around April/May 2021. The state winners will be tasted and judged at a private event in Boise, ID and will include chefs and culinary experts. Once the state winners are decided and announced there will be a second round of judging. This second round will divide America into 4 regions as seen below and the state winners will go head to head at the Boise Ice Cream Festival on June 19th, 2021. Around 2,000 ticketed festival goers will be sampling all the state winners and voting for the regional champions. A list of the award categories, rules, and entry forms will be posted here in June 2020.
The main way to get your entries to the festival will be through overnight shipping of pints on dry ice through FedEx or UPS. We will have some resources available for those that typically don’t ship frozen products often. The packages will be shipped to Boise Cold Storage and go straight into their deep freeze facility for safe keeping.
The festival will need 4 pints or two quarts in order to do the state and regional judging. You could ship all 4 pints in your initial shipment. You could also only send one pint per flavor and enter several different flavors and categories. You would need to have a follow up shipment of additional pints for those flavors that win the state awards so that there is enough to be judged at the regional championships.
State winners will be invited to the Boise Ice Cream Festival to attend the regional judging event. During the festival there will also be exclusive seminars and receptions for the winners that will be hosted by local and national grocery stores discussing opportunities and challenges associated with entering the frozen retail market. These will be very informative for those looking to expand retail distribution and to network both with the nation’s best craft ice cream makers and these retail industry leaders.
All contestants that ship product for entry will be featured on the American Ice Cream Awards directory for the year and many will receive special social media shutouts. If you have video marketing telling your story we are glad to host those too so that the world can truly get a better sense of what a great industry this is and meet some of the wonderful folks dedicated to taste, quality, and regional partnerships.
If you have questions prior to the reference documents being posted please reach out to [email protected]