Rumination Summits: Community. Change. Cheese.

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We’re a small but mighty team creating a robust Summit series with the support and wisdom of our peers—but we need financial support to get us through the winter and our partner recruitment period.

We’re launching Rumination Summits, a new platform for food industry professionals and the larger foodie community to discuss, examine, and challenge our greater food systemand our place within it, all through the lens of the cheese board. Our food system in the U.S. today is broken. We’ve heard about how 1 in 6 Americans faces hunger, even as other Americans collectively waste 150,000 tons of food each day. We need to unite as an industry and work together to create real systematic impact. That's where Rumination Summits come in. We curate pop-up conferences in four different cities each year, so our community has a place to collaborate, problem-solve, and act. Most important, we'll learn to make more informed decisions about the food we buy, sell, and share.

Rumination Summits exist as a way for participants in the food industry to escape from their day-to-day duties and collectively work on the issues on which they may not otherwise know how or where to act. At Rumination Summits, you’ll meet professionals from all realms of food who are motivated to come together to improve our ailing food system. Donating to Rumination Summits is supporting the creation of pop-up think tanks that are designed to produce actionable change.

Panel discussions and Q&A sessions with captains of industry digging into pertinent issues such as building a business model that includes animal welfare or maintaining biological diversity through our food choices

• Lectures on ruminants' impact on the environment

• Discussions on workforce diversity and immigrant populations in the specialty food industry

• Guided tastings teaching sensory analysis and featuring products from our Monger-Maker Exchange, a program that helps small producers get feedback during R&D from mongers across the country (contact us to join in!)

• Workshops that help you actively understand microbial ecologies and the science of terroir

• Cutting-edge design thinking workshops to problem solve how individuals and their workplace can create more sustainable practices

Cheesemongers and nose-to-tail butchers from specialty and independent shops

• Staff behind the deli counters at major grocery stores

• Chefs, caterers, cooks, bakers

• Culinary students from kitchens across the country

• Sommeliers, brewers, wine and cider makers, distillers, and servers in the beverage world

• Importers, distributors, and those who make the food move

• Select enthusiasts 

Ruminate is the larger organization that hosts Rumination Summits. Through the lens of one of food’s most thoughtful presentations, the cheese board, Ruminate supports food systems with a conscience and fosters smarter connections between good people and good food. The cheese board touches all parts of the food system: from policy to farming and animal welfare; from microbiology and flavor to consumption and culture. Ruminate leverages diverse methods of education and collaboration, hosts summits and classes, teams up with culinary schools, and develops programs that support positive behavior change.