Three companies from Maine have won Good Food Awards for 2024 from the Good Food Foundation.Coffee By Design in Portland won for its Costa Rica Danilo Salazar Finca San Cristobal Natural.Maine Beer Company in Freeport won for its Woods & Waters.Speckled Ax Wood Roasted Coffee in Portland won two awards: for its Costa Rica La Guaca Natural and for its Guatemala La Bonita.There were more than 1,750 entries for the Good Food Awards this year with 428 finalists. In the east region, there were 49 winners, including the four from Maine. Other winners in the region came from Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.Good Food Award recipients are recognized for the taste and quality of their products and have met sustainable and responsible production criteria."This award, timed with our 30th year in business, means a lot to us, and our team," said Coffee By Design owner Mary Allen Lindemann. "We're excited to share this honor with the Salazar family and the coffee farmers, and thank them for being such great stewards of their land and coffee."The Good Food Awards coffee judging is done in two rounds. The first is a public coffee tasting; they provide five anonymized coffees from a pool of over 200 entrants to members of the public and coffee drinkers at all levels of interest. The judges' job is to brew, taste and score the samples at home, based on their flavor, aroma, and overall impression. The select coffees that score highly in round 1, move on to round 2, a virtual, professional cupping where the coffees are tasted and scored by experts around the country using the Roasters Guild Roast Evaluation form. Scores are tabulated and winners are chosen from each region of the U.S.