General Question for Festival Coordinators re: Judging
 

Hi, everybody - I am the coordinator of the Mid-Atlantic festival (MAGTAG), which will be held for the third time this August. We have not come up with an acceptable way to judge our tomato-tasting contest, and I was wondering how those of you who hold other tomato fests handle the situation. The problems we run into are that the tomatoes that are most prolific, as well as those that are brought to the festival earlier in the day, receive the most samples, and therefore, the most votes. How do we tally the results of our tasting so that they aren't skewed toward these varieties? I've considered having local "celebrity" judges, but everybody enjoys voicing their opinions and I would hate to take that opportunity away from them.

The other problem is that I am usually the only one calculating the results, and it takes a long time before we can announce the winners!

Any suggestions (or examples from your tastings) would be greatly appreciated.

- Cecilia

For SETTFest, I do not think we will be repeating the individual score sheets this year. People scored a few and then quit.

Instead, I intend to put up a posterboard where people can write their top 2-3 varieties. Then we can just look at the board and see what wins. :)

I like CHOPTAGs method.
Everyone who brings maters has a table they set up for what they bring.
Near the end of the tasting, everyone selects the best from each table and
transfers it to the judging table.
Then everyone picks the best from that table by a showing of hands voting style.

Very quick and simple.

Lee

Hi,
At ours we started at like 1pm or so and everyone was pretty prompt with in the hour.(Not sure of the amount of people but over 30.) We put out all the tomatoes on paper plates with the name of the tomato. None were cut. Photos were take of all of them.(This is good if you have avid an photographer as a guest.) Once we were done photographing, a small group of us went around and cut one on each plate into small bit size pieces. This actually went by very fast.
Then we announced it was judging time. Everyone had a small score card with each category, best tasting, sweetest, boldest, and ugliest, listed with no scoring system, just right down your personal winner for each category. There was place at the bottom for notes if needed. Once everyone was done, I went and tallied the votes. We did have one tie, and I used the eldest tomato grower as the tie breaker.
This year though since there were so many tomatoes last year, I think we may ask people to decide which ones they think should be entered into a category and leave the rest for show/personal tasting.
Remy