Utah's largest recognition program, and the caveat every page citing one of its medals inherits: a paid, self-nominated entry in one of 764 categories.

Best of State Awards

resource confidence: Medium status: Useful updated 2026-08-11

Type: resource
Status: Useful
Confidence: Medium
Tier: D
Focus: awards program, recognition, Utah organizations, self-nomination, evidence calibration
Domain: culture-place
Primary Location: Orem, UT
Utah Location: statewide
Region: statewide
Website: https://www.bestofstate.org
Updated: 2026-08-11

Summary

Best of State is a Utah recognition program that has run since 2002 and now awards several hundred medals a year across ten divisions. It matters to this wiki twice over: as a program Utah organizations actually use, and as a citation that turns up constantly on Utah company websites, where "Best of State winner" is doing work as evidence. This page exists so that every wiki page mentioning a medal can point at one place for what the award does and does not establish.

Two awards, and they are not the same signal. A medal goes to the winner of a category; there were 474 medals in 2026, drawn from a taxonomy of 764 categories, of which 215 are dining categories. A statue — the BOSS — goes to one winner per division per year, chosen by the judges from that division's medalists, so roughly ten a year against every other medalist in the division (2025 program book). A statue is a substantially stronger claim than a medal, and the program's current website conflates the two.

What produces the winner set is a paid, self-nominated entry judged on its own contents: $300 for most categories, $85 for the reduced-fee ones, with payment as step two of the submission form (nomination page); "Best of State encourages self-nomination", and "all judging is based solely on information provided in the nomination" (2019 winners directory). Scoring is 50 percent excellence and achievement, 30 percent innovation and creativity, 20 percent contribution to quality of life in Utah, tabulated by an outside accounting firm, with anonymous volunteer judges.

How to read a medal, then. It is decent evidence that an organization existed in that year, cared enough to enter, and satisfied volunteer judges reading its own submission — useful for dating a company's activity and for third-party corroboration of a self-description. It is not evidence of market position, scale, or being the best at anything, and the absence of an organization from these lists means nothing whatsoever: Utah's largest and most consequential companies are almost entirely missing from them. Since only entrants can win, the likeliest explanation is that they never entered — though nothing published says who declined to enter, so absence cannot be read as a judgment either way.

Medal counts are the most misread number here. In the 2026 directory, one individual holds seven medals across five divisions and one nonprofit holds ten across four (2026 winners page). Nothing improper is happening: entering many categories is permitted, each entry is paid for separately, and each is judged on its own. But it means "15x Best of State Winner" — a line that appears in the program book's own advertisements — measures category filings, not fifteen contests won against fifteen fields.

Who It's For

Utah organizations, programs, and individuals looking for third-party recognition they can put in front of customers, donors, or a hiring pipeline. The eligibility bar is a Utah nexus and nothing more — "nominees must either live, work, or do business in Utah" — and a nominee may be an individual, a business, or any other organization (2019 winners directory). Nonprofits, schools, city programs, and sole practitioners win alongside companies.

It is a poor fit for anyone who needs recognition that survives technical scrutiny — a grant reviewer or an acquirer will not weight it — and a good fit for consumer-facing and community-facing work, where the medal is a marketing asset the program explicitly licenses: winners receive the right to display the logo and award year on their website and promotional material (2025 program book).

For agents and researchers, this page is the calibration layer: read it before repeating an award claim found on a company's site.

How To Use It

To enter. Nominations run through bestofstate.org/nominate, and the 2026 cycle was open through March 15 — mid-March has been the deadline since at least the 2020 season. Pick one of the ten divisions and a subcategory from the 764 on the category list, pay the fee for that category's tier, and attach supporting documents (up to ten files). Entering multiple categories is permitted and common, which is how organizations and individuals accumulate several medals in a single year (nomination page, category list).

To cite a medal in this wiki. Cite the year's own winner document — the 2025 program book, the 2019 winners directory, or the 2026 winners page — not a company's claim about itself, and not this page. Three specific hazards:

Featured cards are not reliable award records. Six of them are placeholder content: Cedarbrook Bistro, Wasatch Atelier, Nucleus Labs, High Lake Cellars, Granite Works, and Beacon Wildlands Trust each appear once for every year from 2020 through 2025, with identical medal numbers and identical copy, and in no actual winner list (2026 winners page). The flat directory lower on the same page is the real data.
Do not cite the about page for any number. Its three headline statistics each contradict a document the program itself published.
Say medal or statue, never just "won Best of State". The distinction is the whole difference between one of ~474 awards and one of ten.

To find a pre-2020 winner. The official archive starts at 2020 and calls that a "permanent record" (past winners archive). Earlier years exist only in the Internet Archive; this wiki's recovered rows for 2003 and 2005–2019 are in research/leads/best-of-state-winners-2003-2019.tsv, with the recovery method documented beside them.

Open Questions

Nobody publishes how many nominees a category draws, and it is the number that would settle what a medal means. With 764 categories on the 2026 list and 474 medals awarded, on the order of 290 categories produced no winner at all that year — arithmetic across two captured documents — which implies thin or empty fields in much of the taxonomy. Setting the two documents side by side per division sharpens it: Dining offers 215 categories and awarded 95 medals, Sports & Recreation offers 49 and awarded 17, Science & Technology offers 37 and awarded 21. Roughly two of every five categories drew a winner. The repeat-entrant rows point the same way: if seven of the year's medals go to one person, those fields are unlikely to be deep. Whether a given medal beat fifty entrants or one is still not knowable from anything published.
The judging has no independent audit, and its conflict rule is self-triggered. Independent scoring, anonymous judges, and outside tabulation are all described by the program, about the program (2025 program book). Gilbert & Stewart certifies the arithmetic, not the fairness. On conflicts, the program's own wording is that judges abstain where they "feel" they have a personal conflict and that scores are dropped only "if Best of State is made aware" of one — a control with no described way to catch an undisclosed conflict, made harder by the judges' anonymity.
The program book is partly funded by winners. Full-page advertisements throughout the 2025 book are bought by organizations advertising their own medal counts. The program states that sponsorship does not affect results; no third party has tested that.
Historical entry fees are unknown. The $300/$85 tiers are 2026 figures. The 2019 directory says only "a nominal entry fee applies to each nomination", so no medal from an earlier year can be priced.
Four years of medal lists are still missing — 2002, 2004, 2009, and the full 2011 list — and the statue winners are recovered for only four years (2003, 2007, 2009, and now 2019). Utah newspaper archives published full winner lists in that era and have not been tried.
The wiki records, but does not yet source, that the program has honored people later convicted of major fraud (Jeremy Johnson, 2010 Individual Humanitarian; Patrick Byrne, 2003 Community Development statue). Both rows come from the recovered TSV rather than from a captured document, and no page here asserts them. If they hold, they are the sharpest available evidence that the award tracks reputation at the time of entry rather than durable merit, and they deserve a real source.
The 2019 Science & Technology statue went to "Blackrock Microsystems", and this wiki does not assert that it is the company on Blackrock Neurotech. The inference is easy to make and nothing captured here supports it: no document in the corpus mentions the former name, and neither the Blackrock page's own sources nor the 2019 directory connects them. A Utah business-entity record showing a name change, or the company's own history page, would settle it in one fetch. Until then the statue row stands as an unattached fact — and a statue is the strong form of this award, so attaching it correctly matters more than usual.
The program's legal entity is unresolved. No ein or utah-entity has been pulled for the Best of State Foundation, so its filings, revenue, and governance are undocumented here. It is the cheapest remaining improvement to this page.

Best of State Awards

Summary

Who It's For

How To Use It

Open Questions

Evidence

See Also