Stephen Colbert Highlights Climax Foods’ Good Food Award Snafu On The Late Show

The Late Show featured vegan cheesemaker Climax Foods on its show last night, where Stephen Colbert tried its cheese, and highlighted the controversial Good Food Awards saga.

First it was a mammoth meatball. Now it’s vegan blue cheese.

It seems like Stephen Colbert and The Late Show’s team have their hands on the food tech pulse. Last night, on the programme’s Meanwhile segment, the 59-year-old ate some cheese.

On a normal day, that would maybe have been a little weird at best. But following last week’s events, it was quite a noteworthy piece of TV, mixed with just the right amount of humour, gravitas and delight.

“America’s facing a major cheese controversy,” announced Colbert, highlighting a Washington Post story describing the first time a vegan cheese – Climax Foods’ blue cheese – beat dairy in the famed Good Food Awards, only for things to sour quickly.

Colbert went on to poke some light-hearted fun at his friend and former The Daily Show boss Jon Stewart (who is famously vegan) and Climax Foods’ brand name, before describing what went down.

What happened with Climax Foods and the Good Food Awards

The Bay Area-based startup uses AI to reverse-engineer what makes cheese taste good. Made from a blend of pumpkin seeds, lima beans, hemp seeds, coconut fat and cocoa butter, the Climax Blue is so well-regarded in the culinary world, it has appeared on the menus of Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park and Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn.

So the cheese doing well in a competition isn’t surprising. What is shocking, however, is what happened to its Good Food Award nomination. While many plant-based cheeses have entered the competition, none have ever won. Climax Foods was about to change that, having been told it was going to win an award for its blue cheese three months ago. The startup’s team was invited to attend the ceremony on April 29 as part of a “weekend of festivities”.

But when news of its status as a finalist came out in January, traditional cheesemakers were – to put it bluntly – pissed. And that’s when things got messy. A week before the ceremony, Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn, received an email from the event organiser, the Good Food Foundation, which said the company’s cheese had been disqualified from the competition.

The email said it was because of the cheese’s use of kokum butter – which hasn’t been designated as GRAS [Generally Regarded as Safe] by the US Food and Drug Administration – as well as the fact that it wasn’t “retail ready”. But when Climax Foods submitted its blue cheese for consideration six months ago, there was no explicit rule requiring GRAS certification or a product to be ready for retail. And in any case, Zahn insisted that the cheese is ready to be sold in supermarkets.

The awards website now states those stipulations, but in January (when the finalists were announced), there was no mention of GRAS, and the requirement was that foods are ready for sale (not necessarily for retail). Zahn suggested to AgFunderNews that the retrospective change of rules came “in direct response to a dairy industry person that contacted them this month to come up with a way to disqualify us”.

Sarah Weiner, executive director at the Good Food Foundation, confirmed that the GRAS criterion wasn’t stated until recently, but added that it has always been part of its regulations. “It is not an issue we have come across in past years, and it was assumed that all ingredients entrants used were generally recognized as safe for consumption in the USA,” she said. “When we realised it needed to be made explicit to avoid this unfortunate and I’m sure extremely disappointing situation in the future, we updated the rules and regulations.”

She told the Wall Street Journal that only thrice before had the awards undergone something similar, with the foundation being informed that a contestant may not meet the requirements. “I think there were a lot more eyes on this particular entrant than there would be on one of the hundreds of other finalists,” she said. “Which made it more likely that someone with expertise would reach out.” Weiner didn’t say who tipped the foundation off about Climax, but Zahn suspected it to be an outspoken “informant” from the dairy cheese sector, accusing the foundation of caving to that industry’s pressure.

Did Stephen Colbert like Climax’s vegan blue cheese?

While Climax Foods submitted a blue cheese made and labelled with kokum butter, it has since changed its recipe to cocoa butter. Zahn said the company was happy to send more samples, but alleged that his team was never contacted by the awards organisers. Weiner, however, said the foundation emailed and called the person who had submitted the application — who no longer works at Climax Foods — and then emailed another staffer, who did not respond.

“I don’t want to get into a fight over this, but it could so easily have been rectified if we had been contacted earlier. But they never contacted us to remedy the situation,” Zahn told AgFunderNews.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he added: “Changing the rules six months after submission, and then not even trying to reach the company to try to fix a fixable situation? If that happened in my company, I would step down as CEO. Seriously, I would step down because that would be so embarrassing to me that there was no way I could justify continuing to run the company. And I would fire anybody who was involved.”

The whole episode is a shame for both Climax Foods and the Good Food Awards. For the latter, it could have been the torchbearer ushering in a new era for critically acclaimed cheese fit for the future. For the former, it would have attracted retail customers, investors and consumers alike.

But Colbert has boosted the chances of the latter happening anyway. “They’ve clearly captured the look of blue cheese, but have they captured the flavour of severed-foot-fished-out-of-a-canal?” he said in his trademark acerbic manner.

He followed up with yet another sarcastic interpretation of famous vegan tropes – you know, they don’t have friends or food, their bones are dissolved from protein deficiency, that kind of stuff. “You couldn’t just let vegans have this one thing?” he asked the Good Food Foundation.

Then came the taste test. For many viewers and consumers, this is make or break. “This is the actual cheese,” he said, pausing. He chewed some more, his face clenching. “I like it. You can really taste the foot.”

As funny as it was, it’s a mark of respect for the Climax Blue, which stood up to Colbert’s expectations on national television. You can’t get much better publicity than that.

Zahn agreed, writing on LinkedIn: “Thanks for singing the praises in your unique ways, and for that witty examination of the Good Food Award snafu, Stephen, you’re the best.”