Paxton & Whitfield | Level 1: Associate Certification

I’ve just passed my exam using the excellent online materials but more importantly having been on the simply excellent Paxton & Whitfield course. A really great day with knowledgeable and bloody lovely trainers. So hope they do a level 2 face to face course soon.

I completed the in person level one course with Paxton and Whitfield in London. We started the day in the shop tasting a selection of delicious cheeses. We then moved to a spacious class area with plenty of tea and coffee and biscuits and fruit. The course content was varied, from history to manufacture, tasting, regulation, supply chain, et cetera. I had a reasonable grounding in cheesemaking, but learnt a lot. The instructors were lovely, very knowledgeable and made the course entertaining. I left feeling better informed, enthused, and keen to proceed with further certifications.

Having attended a Level 1 course with Paxton and Whitfield, which was a fantastic day, I was able to continue my cheese learning journey with the AoC. I successfully completed the Level 1 Associate training online, which was well-structured and informative, and enjoyed using the SATC to taste my way through as many of the 25 cheeses as I could before taking the exam. Alongside the brilliant team at P&W, the AoC Learning Road provided me with all of the knowledge that I needed, backed up with a variety of online resources to help me through the learning and it obviously worked, because I passed at my first attempt! I’d thoroughly recommend this course to anyone with an interest and passion for cheese and am now giving serious consideration to moving on to the Level 2 training.

Really enjoyed the in person session at the Paxton and Whitfield cheese shop (May 2022), as well as the self study elements.

I feel that the quizzes throughout the course material were almost too easy, so they didn’t accurately reflect the level of difficulty of the exam questions, which was much higher. I was also disappointed not to be able to review the questions I’d gotten wrong from the exam.