Courtney Johnson knows that the correct cheese with which to make a root beer float is Winnimere, from Jasper Hill Farm; that she needs to pick more exciting cheeses for her oral presentations; and that, even after medaling in the cheesemonger competition at last year’s Mondial du Fromage, the World Cup of Cheese, the most common question she will get is “What is a cheesemonger?”

A cheesemonger is someone who sells cheese, as Johnson does alongside business partner Tailor Kowis at their Beacon Hill shop, Street Cheese. The job pulls together a technical skill set like a butcher, the kind of in-depth specialized knowledge required of a sommelier, and—in the language of France, a country famously ripe with cheese—a little je ne sais quoi. “You basically act as a therapist to all these people who come into the store who want to tell you their problems while they’re buying feta,” says Johnson. 

To win the Olympics, Mikaela Shiffrin skied the fastest down the hill, Alysa Liu skated beautifully and ferociously enough to earn the top scores from the judges, and Team USA put the puck in the back of the net over and over. To medal in the Mondial, Johnson needed similar speed, precision, and artful aesthetics, as well as the endurance of a cross-country skier and the mind of a Jeopardy! champion.

The nine-part, nine-hour competition includes a multiple-choice test, and while Johnson alludes to her academic background in her Instagram handle, @thePhCheese, her doctorate is unfortunately in German literature, not dairy. “Every year there are things on the multiple-choice test that I’m like, ‘Why the hell would you need to know that?’” says Johnson. One year, they asked questions about ultra-pasteurized milk. (You cannot make cheese from ultra-pasteurized milk.)

Kowis is the Mickey to Johnson’s Rocky, the behind-the-scenes force pushing her forward. Only replace the scene of Sylvester Stallone running up the Philadelphia Art Museum stairs with one of them gathered around a piece of cheese paper, watching as a distributor demonstrates proper folding techniques for wrapping various cheeses.

The sculpture segment is the bane of everyone’s existence, says Kowis. She competed once in the Cheesemonger Invitational Masters, the event at which the top two Americans qualify to compete in the Mondial, but decided that she wasn’t built for the strict rules of the competitions. For sculpture, cutting is required; carving illegal. At one competition, she watched a woman get docked for carving a beautiful flower into a sculpture. That suits Johnson, though. “Courtney is really, really good at taking rules and using that as a challenge,” Kowis says.

On September 15, 2025, 18 competitors from 14 countries vied at the Mondial in Tours, France, for the title of world’s best cheesemonger. The assigned sculpture cheese was a distressingly crumbly aged mimolette. Johnson used cookie cutters to make three-dimensional farm animals. Her goat kept falling over.

As she struggled, though, Johnson noticed the emcee circling back to the table. She didn’t understand much of the commentary coming from the balding Frenchman with an outrageous mustache other than his enthusiastic repetition of the phrase “les
animaux.” It tipped her (and her tipping ruminants) off that things were going well. For all the strict rules of the cheese Olympiad, the judges valued a bit of whimsy and outside-the-box thinking, too.

In the past, Johnson had gotten feedback that the cheeses she had chosen for the oral presentation portion were good, but not necessarily exciting. This year, she knew she had to bring something memorable. “Flavored cheese can be controversial,” she says. She highlighted Shadow Blossom, an Alpine-style unpasteurized German cheese coated in a blend of cardamom and five types of pepper. “Oftentimes when they’re added at the creamery, flavoring is there to mask a defect,” she said in her presentation. But not in this case: “The added flavor takes an exceptional cheese and makes it even better.” Despite a timing error preventing her from finishing her presentation, Johnson scored well—some judges later told her the Shadow Blossom was the best cheese they had tried that day.

Johnson took third place in the Mondial; her teammate, Emilia D’Albero of Philadelphia, became the first American to win the whole thing. Articles about the duo’s success came out on CNN and in The Washington Post and Food & Wine; they went on The Kelly Clarkson Show.

Meanwhile, Kowis held down the fort at Street Cheese, which had opened barely a month earlier. Johnson and Kowis hatched the idea of a mobile cheese shop while working together at PCC. Their prepandemic vision was a food truck that would roll up to football games and concerts with cheese platters. When they actually got moving in the fall of 2020, the concept of crowds had melted away. They kept their day jobs and did pop-ups at breweries, then classes and tastings. By 2023, the dream of a mobile cheese business crashed into reality. They had outgrown the concept, and the cost was nearly the same as if they had a stationary cheese shop. They changed gears and, after almost two years of preparation, Street Cheese opened on July 31, 2025.

As Johnson prepared for the Mondial, she drew on what she learned to get people more interested in and excited about cheese at the shop. She hoped for the inverse, too. “You always have this fantasy that if you win the competition, it will help to buoy the shop along and help bring in more business.”

The Mondial takes place every two years, so Johnson doesn’t know yet if she’ll be invited to compete again. If she is, Kowis is right there with her. “There are some people in the cheese world who want to see her win first place, and I think that she can do it,” Kowis says.

“We both just really love cheese and love to share cheese with people,” says Johnson, and, ultimately, that’s why people enter the competition. “We go and we share in what other people are doing, and are inspired by it. And then we bring that back to our customers, and we’re like, ‘Hey, look at this cool thing that you can do with this cheese. Yeah, you should make a root beer float with this.’”