What the Stars Mean: A Guide to the Great Taste Awards, the World's Largest Blind Food Judging, and How to Read Them on a Label
Food awards are, for the most part, worth very little. Most are pay-to-enter, judged by a handful of people who know exactly whose product they are tasting, and hand out enough medals that a wall of them tells you nothing. The small black-and-gold Great Taste sticker is the exception that a fine food shop learns to look for, because the judging is blind, the panels are broad and rotate, the scale is enormous, and the majority of the products entered walk away with no stars at all. This guide explains how it works, what the stars mean, and how much weight to give a sticker when you are standing in front of two jars.
Who runs it
The Great Taste Awards are run by the Guild of Fine Food, a British trade body for independent food shops, delis and producers, and have been judged every year since 1994. Entries come from across Britain, Ireland and, increasingly, the rest of Europe and the world; recent years have seen well over thirteen thousand products entered, which makes it by a wide margin the largest food and drink judging on earth. Producers pay a fee per product to enter, which funds the judging; the fee buys a tasting, not a result.
How the judging works
Every product is decanted from its packaging, plated in a plain white dish with a number, and tasted by a panel that does not know the brand, the price or the producer. The panels are made up of chefs, buyers, food writers, cooks and retailers, dozens at a time in several judging rooms over many weeks, and the same product is tasted by more than one panel before it can be awarded anything. Judges write comments as well as scores, and those comments are sent to every producer, including the ones who win nothing, which is one reason serious small producers enter: the feedback from a blind panel is worth more than the sticker. A product must convince successive panels to move up the scale, and anything that reaches the top is tasted again by a final panel of experienced judges before the stars are confirmed.
What the stars mean
One star. The judges found the product simply delicious, well made and true to what it claims to be. Roughly a quarter to a third of entries reach one star, which means most do not; a one-star on a jar is a real and honest achievement and the one most often misread as a participation prize.
Two stars. Outstanding: the panel found something above the ordinary, a product that stood out for flavor, texture, craft or all three. A minority of entries get there.
Three stars. Exquisite, in the Guild's word; a product several panels agreed was among the best of its kind they had tasted. Only around one or two percent of everything entered reaches three stars in a given year, which puts a three-star jar in the company of a few hundred products out of many thousands.
The Golden Fork and the Supreme Champion. From the three-star products, the judges choose category and regional winners, the Golden Forks, and a single Supreme Champion for the year. These are the awards that make a producer's career, and they are announced at a dinner in the autumn.
How to read the sticker
The stars on a label refer to a specific product in a specific year, and the year is printed on the sticker. A jam that won two stars in one year has to enter again the next, and often does not; a sticker from several years ago tells you the producer was good then and is probably still good, but it is not a current verdict. Different flavors and sizes are judged separately, so a two-star fig jam says nothing about the same maker's apricot. And a product can be excellent and unentered; many of the best producers in the world have never sent a jar to Dorset, and their absence from the list means nothing. The sticker is evidence, not proof, and it is strongest when it is recent, three-starred and on the product you are holding.
Why a shop trusts it
For a buyer, the value of the Great Taste system is the blindness and the scale. A product tasted by dozens of experienced palates who could not see the label, ranked against thousands of others in the same weeks, is about as objective as food judgment gets. It does not tell you whether the product suits your kitchen, and it is weighted toward British and Irish producers, but when a jar we are considering carries three recent stars, it goes to the top of the tasting pile, and when a producer we already stock wins, we mention it. Our producer guides, from the Modena acetaia to the Utah chocolate maker, note the awards that matter for each, and the cannery piece explains why a blind panel can taste hand-packing.
The other stickers
The Great Taste sticker has cousins that work on similar principles and are covered in their own guides: the International Chocolate Awards and Academy of Chocolate for bars, the NYIOOC and Flos Olei for olive oil, the sofi Awards for American specialty food, the Good Food Awards for American craft producers. Each is blind, each publishes its winners, and each is worth more than a gold medal from a competition you have never heard of. The stickers on our shelf are on the products they were awarded to, with the year, at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and online at theambrosianpantry.com.
