Rules
2025 “15 Years of Good Food Awards” Criteria
- Product(s) submitted must have won a Good Food Award in any year since the program’s inception.
- Product(s) submitted must remain in current production with an active SKU. Products like Oils and Coffee with a specific year of production that is no longer available may enter so long as a current version of the product will be available for sale by May 2025.
- Entering company supports the Good Food Foundation’s mission and remains committed to practices that advance safety, care, respect, and sustainability for people and planet.
- Entering company has a proven track record of prioritizing a safe and fairly-compensated work culture, with no violations in the area of wage or workplace safety in the past 5 years, subject to verification on the Good Jobs First Violation Tracker.
- The Good Food Foundation reserves the right to update the criteria, rules, and regulations as needed in service of its mission.
$45 entry fee per product (covers vetting, voting, administrative costs, and awards.)
Contact connect@goodfoodfdn.org if you would prefer to pay by check.
Regulations
To learn more about any of the following Good Food Awards topics, click below.
Entry Period for our 2025 “15 Years of Good Food Awards” ends January 9th, 2025. The best way to keep informed about dates is by signing up for our newsletter at the bottom of the homepage.
The entry process was designed to be as simple as possible. You’ll fill out a short online entry form then pay the $45 entry fee per product. Once our Community Choice voting platform opens in April 2025, you can spread the word to help get out the vote. You may be contacted for a vetting interview to verify products meet all of the entry criteria.
To begin, use the short online entry form. This form will be accessible from the Awards page. The entry form requires basic company information and for you to enter the past winning products you wish to submit. Please add connect@goodfoodfdn.org to your email inbox so that you receive all further updates about your entry status.
The 15th annual Good Food Awards will honor past winners with a special “15 Years of Good Food Awards” Community Choice voting program. We’ll engage our good food community to select the most beloved and enduring food and drink from 18 different categories: beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, cider, coffee, confections, drinks, elixirs, preserved fish, grains, honey, oils, pantry, pickles, preserves, snacks, and spirits.
For the types of foods eligible from each category, please view the standards page.
2025 Award entries are limited only by the number of past winning products you are eligible to enter.
General
- Products are made, packed, and stored in licensed or certified facilities, in a manner that follows all federal, state, and local regulations.
- Products are ready for sale.
There is a $45 entry fee for each product submitted. This fee goes to offset the cost of processing entries, vetting, the voting platform, and awards. The fee is payable with a credit card upon completion of the entry form.
All entry fees are non-refundable.
For the 2025 “15 Years of Good Food Awards”, we ask that with each product entered you submit a current product photo. This will help us with our marketing and media outreach, and help Community Choice voters identify your products. If you don’t have a photo at the time of entry, please upload a company logo or a photo that is representative of your business. You’ll be able to update with another photo later.
Winners will be announced on or before June 28, 2025. Stay tuned for details!
The Good Food Awards honor food produced throughout the United States. In order to fairly represent the diverse food traditions and growing seasons around the country, special 2025 awards recognize producers in each of five regions. (See map below for regional breakdown.)
It is our hope that by honoring producers nationwide, we will encourage food producers and small farmers in every pocket of the country.
- Committee Chairs and Members may not serve as judges at the Good Food Awards Blind Tasting.
- Judges may not submit products to the category they are judging. They may submit products to other categories.*
- Only Committee Chairs and Members (up to 3 per category) and Good Food Awards staff may have access to entrant information. They may share the names of submitting companies with committee members as part of the group effort to do outreach for entries, but no other product information.
- Only Committee Chairs may have access to Blind Tasting scores, and may not share the information with anyone besides Good Food Awards staff. If a Committee Chair works for a company entering the Good Food Awards, they will not be the designated Chair who has access to scores. Should both Chairs be affiliated with entering companies, the Good Food Awards will designate an unaffiliated person to collect and coordinate the scoring during the Blind Tasting.
- No more than one person from any given company or organization may serve on each category’s judging panel.*
* Coffee category is exempt from this rule, though efforts will be made to follow it to the extent possible without compromising the level of expertise on the tasting panel.