What I Learned Judging S5 of the Craft Chocolat Challenge | #PSC 198
Episode 198 of #PodSaveChocolate is an exploration of my judging process for the 2026 (Season 5) Craft Chocolat Challenge. I’ve judged many competitions, and each one is an opportunity to learn.
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Episode 198 Overview
Every chocolate competition I have judged (Next Generation Chocolatier, International Chocolate Awards (Americas, Peru, and World Finals rounds), Good Food Awards, Bean-to-Bar Brasil Awards, and the Craft Chocolat Challenge, among others) has a unique rubric – its own framework for what will be judged and how.
I was responsible for developing the judging rubric and moderated the judging for the Next Generation Chocolatier competition. At the Good Food Awards, I was a “table judge” twice in the confectionery category, which meant I was responsible for implementing the judging for tables of five-to-six judges as I saw fit, and I was a part of developing the judging rubric for the Craft Chocolat Challenge that has been implemented into beanstalkr as well as the guidelines for judges.
These differences make sense because each competition, while nominally judging “the same thing,” is actually judging different things. For example, confectionery is not judged in the Craft Chocolat Challenge; there are only four main categories, with fewer than 100 entries, and under ten judges. In the 2025 World Finals in the International Chocolate Awards, there are either nine or ten main categories (if you agree that “white spreads” are a separate category from spreads) and 39 sub-categories (or 40 if you don’t agree that “white spreads” are a separate category from “spreads”). And, we don’t actually know how many entries there were because the ICA organizers do not publish that number.
This has been an ongoing source of conflict between the ICA organizers and me. I have hypotheses about why they don’t want to make much information public, but no hard data.
In this episode of PodSaveChocolate, I will take you through the judging process for the Craft Chocolat Challenge on beanstalkr and how I use the judging forms, which are different from those the general public uses – and what I learned in the process.
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Clay Gordon
Clay Gordon