Americans love cheese. Cheese consumption reached an all time high
in the United States in 2018, which is weird because Americans are
drinking less milk than ever. Consumption of fluid milk plummeted from 247
pounds per person in 1975 to 146 pounds per person in 2018. But at the same time, cheese grew from
just over 14 pounds in 1975 to about 38 pounds in 2018. Plus an extra two pounds of cottage
cheese, which, let's be honest, is really a separate
category altogether. The only other category of dairy product
that has seen such growth over the last half century has been yogurt, which
is still a far smaller share of the total than cheese
in terms of consumption. So why are Americans eating so much
more cheese when many other categories of dairy are either falling
stagnant or growing only slightly? The rise of cheese in the United States
owes a lot to the rise of restaurants, carry and delivery, according
to cheese historian Paul Paul Kindstedt. One type of cheese that
has absolutely exploded since the 1970s is mozzarella. The stuff you are most likely
to see melted all over pizza. Americans at 1.19 pounds of mozzarella
per person in 1970 and 12.15 pounds in 2018, making it the
most popular single variety of cheese in America. And yes, pizza is said
to be one of the primary reasons mozzarella has become so popular
across the United States. Pizza moves about 25 percent. When you talk about mozzarella, pizza
moves about 25 percent of the cheese, you know, in the US. But moves a tremendous
amount of volume. Pizza was once not the
American favorite it is today. Instead, it was a distinctly Italian
specialty found in the mostly Italian sections of cities
around the country. But in the middle of the
20th century, pizza went mainstream. Large chains such as Domino's, Pizza
Hut and Little Caesars brought the Neapolitan Street food to the masses
and pizzas reach has been growing ever since. A study in 2014 from
the USDA found that one in eight Americans aged two years or older, and
more than 25 percent of all males between the ages of six and 19 ate
a slice or more on any given day. The US pizza market was worth
more than $45 billion in 2019. Domino's, the world's largest pizza
chain, built its business on perfecting the art of rapidly making
and delivering pizza to households around the country. As it has grown
more popular, the pizza market has segmented from cheap slices all the
way up to gourmet pies. There are sit-down restaurants, carry-out
delivery, take and bake and pizzas at the grocery
store, fresh and frozen. What's happening with the whole pizza
category and the cheese piece, you still have that value pizza you can get
for two dollars at the grocery all the way up to $20 plus
at restaurants and continued innovation taking place with brick oven pizzas. Now, you know, they're selling $5,000 pizza
ovens that people put in their backyard. While pizza is originally
Italian, American companies have successfully exported their own version
to other countries around the world. Even those were cheese is
traditionally rarely eaten, such as China. But other varieties of cheese
have also benefited from the decades long growth of food
service in the U.S. The increasing popularity of cuisines
such as Mexican and Southwestern-style food have boosted
the popularity of classic American-style cheese varieties such
as Cheddar and Jack. We partnered with Taco Bell. We started working with them in 2012. They used to view cheese as a
garnish like lettuce and tomatoes, and we started showing them all these new
innovative properties that cheese can do. You know, now they
stuff the shell with cheese. You know, we just launched with
them a grilled cheese burrito where actually, you know, it's got cheese sauce
on the inside and a melted cheese on top. Their consumers love
the transformative properties. And so that's just a really fun thing
that you see why it's so important to the consumer, because they can use
in so many different ways in the transformation. The way mozzarella has been
able to piggyback on pizza to achieve its popularity says a lot about
how the fate of one food product is often tied to that of another. In the middle of the 20th century,
another cheesy substance road high in the U.S., in large part on
the popularity of another classic American dish: the fast-food hamburger. It is hard to talk about the
history of cheese in America without talking about, well, American cheese. The yellow orange slices are famed
as essential components of classic American diner staples, such as
cheeseburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches and tuna melts. American cheese is a processed cheese, which
means it is made from cheese and some other ingredients that, among
other things, help prolong its shelf life and allow it
to be smoothly melted. Perhaps the best known brand of American
cheese Kraft singles are made of milk, cheddar cheese, whey, milk
protein concentrate, milk fat, sodium citrate, calcium phosphate, modified
food starch, whey protein concentrate, salt, lactic acid, annatto
and paprika extract for color, natamycin, which is a natural mold
inhibitor, enzymes, cheese culture and vitamin D3. Apart from slices such as Kraft
singles, processed cheese also refers to products such as Velveeta and a range
of spreadable cheeses such as cream cheese and cheese products such as
Easy Cheese and Cheez Whiz. It appears a few different groups
of food scientists were working on recipes that would become what
we know as American cheese. But in 1916, the Canadian born
American businessman James Lewis Kraft patented the process for producing the
American cheese that would make the Kraft brand name famous. Later, American cheese became a
staple ingredient on cheeseburgers served all around America and later around
the world by fast food giants. Perhaps most famously, McDonald's. You look at like a McDonald's right, and
the launch of that chain and the launch of the hamburger using American cheese
on that kind of just helped install that culture and
in the world. And I always, I always still tell people
the fun fact: if you think about 85 percent of cheeseburgers...or burgers have
cheese on it, and only about 10 percent of chicken
sandwiches have cheese. I would much rather have the taste
of beef versus the taste of chicken, there kind of side by side. They're kind of...chicken's blander yet they
put more cheese on beef and chicken. So chicken's an opportunity
when you think about that. However, processed cheeses have declined in
popularity over the last decade or so. For example, Industry Research
Group IRI told CNBC that processed cheeses such as slices and spreads sold
in the cheese section of the grocery store dairy aisle have seen
sales decline nearly 18 percent since 1995, from eight point seven pounds per
person that year to seven point zero seven pounds in 2018. So there's a couple of categories
within dairy that have been struggling over the past few years, one
being processed cheese and one being margarine. And so you think about
how consumers have moved away from processed food, processed cheese and
and margarine have really struggled over the last five years. Processed cheeses like processed foods in
general have their critics who say these long-loved goods are
unhealthy examples of America's misapplication of industrial manufacturing
methods to food. It is not even
cheese, say some haters. In a comment to CNBC, Kraft
said its process historically brought safe, fresh and convenient cheese to millions of
Americans at a time when that wasn't the norm. American cheese continues
to be popular in over 60 percent of households. Kraft also said it makes over 30 flavors
of natural cheese in a variety of cuts. Some industry analysts think the
decline has to do with these consumer concerns and with the
way processed foods are labeled. Processed cheese, as you know, I
think it suffers from having a nomenclature that, you know, from the
code of federal regulations its named as processed cheese, and that has
to be on the package, you know, legally. And what does process mean? A lot of them are,
you know, all dairy. It just allows it to have a longer
shelf life and the science behind it allows it to melt just beautifully. And that's why it's so great on
a burger, because it's just got that perfect melt. You know, if I want to
make a cheese dip, there's not much better than a processed cheese to put
that together because of its smooth melt, it's not going to oil up. That's the properties it owns
and it should have. Intriguingly, while grocery sales of
processed cheese are down, customers ordering cheese or sandwiches with cheese
at the deli counter, whether in a grocery store or elsewhere, seem to
be opting for American cheese, the processed kind at about the same
rates they have in the past. Another reason why processed cheese might be
falling out of favor is that technology for packaging natural
cheese has improved tremendously, undercutting the need
for preservatives. When you shipping forward
to the category, you. What happened was it was the introduction
of all the new flavored cheese and also, I'll call the
packaging system, higher quality packaging preservative systems to enable natural cheese
to be launched and stay without molding. You know, if you look
at like a sliced sandwich cheeses today, you know, you definitely need to,
you know, rely more on multi-vac systems to be able to preserve, shut
and seal, you know, with less preserve. Right, they have zero preservatives
like the natural or the processed cheese have. And it is
notable, however, that processed cheese has seen a bit of a resurgence
of interest amid the coronavirus pandemic. With more people cooking at home,
stocking their pantries and perhaps eager for nostalgic comfort foods, the fact
that processed cheese is processed might actually now be
a selling point. But consumers now with, with faced with
wanting to have products that have a longer shelf life, that maybe were
canned, that they were shopping in different the different sections of the
store that maybe they hadn't shopped in before. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese,
I think, had a huge, you know, a huge uptick in terms of
the volume that it sold during COVID. But what we saw was we saw processed
cheese and margarine all of a sudden did some pretty good growth, which we
hadn't seen, again, for like the last four or five years. Kraft told CNBC it has seen double-digit
growth in its singles product in 2020 and pointed out that internet
searches for grilled cheese sandwiches, which frequently feature Kraft singles,
are up 30 percent. While restaurants are largely behind the
rise of cheese eating in America, what consumers are buying at grocery
stores also shows how the cheese market has changed. Stores are stocking ever-greater varieties of
cheese in an array of forms to make it easier for customers
to incorporate cheese into their diets. The aforementioned changes in packaging have
had a huge impact, and not just on processed cheese. Historically, grocery store cheese was
sold mostly in blocks. Over the last few decades, companies have
found ways to package cheese for convenience and to market new
categories of products for customers. Kraft American Singles. These pasteurized processed cheese food slices
can make your basic tuna salad sandwich pretty special. They're individually wrapped, so
they're easy to open. Sometimes all a company has to do to
induce customers to buy cheese is cut it for them. For example, those
bags of shredded cheese you see everywhere; they came about in the
1990s when the process for easily shredding and packaging large amounts
of cheese was developed. Now shredded cheese is the biggest
seller of natural cheese varieties. The entire natural cheese category is
worth around $17-$18 billion, and shredded cheese alone is about
$6 billion of that. Customers like the convenience. One of the things we looked at, is
once you put a shredded cheese in the household, they just use
so many different ways. I think about a quarter of the usage
was just people snacking out of it. You know, if you're making
a omelet, people still snack. If you're making a quesadilla they
were still snacking before they even made the quesadilla and it just became
a snacking device and it actually led to different snacking forms being introduced
wen you go in homes and do that ethnography
with the products. That's where you see a lot of
innovation take place,"well, how are you using this?" There is also pre-sliced
natural cheese, which is sold in what are called shingled packs, because
they resemble the shingles found on a roof. But those don't
sell as well as whole blocks. Cheese is also cut into crumbles, sticks,
cubes and other snack or garnish ready sizes. The Babybel brand sells
small wax-coated wheels of cheese. Brands such as Oscar Mayer and Sargento
sell snack packs with cheese meat, nuts, dried fruit and chocolate. In some cases, these companies are trying
to promote cheese as a portable protein source, capitalizing on interest
in high protein diets. Oscar Meyer even calls one
product Portable Protein Packs. It is a way to keep cheese
palatable and relevant to customers whose tastes in recent years have increasingly
veered toward foods that are at least perceived to be
natural and healthy. One potential challenge to
cheese is plant-based cheeses. So far, these are a
small portion of the market. Only about 3.3 percent of products
competing with processed cheese are plant-based and 0.1 percent of those
competing with natural cheeses are plant-based. But technology
is improving. To remain competitive with new rivals
like these cheese makers are experimenting with technology that can infuse
cheese with new flavors and are even trying out different feeds for
dairy cattle in a similar manner to the trend in grass-fed beef. You know, I would say in the last
decade you started seeing, it's more in the higher end restaurant arenas, but, you
know, you start to see some cool things. The fusion of cheese,
whether it's cheese infused with coffee, cheese infused with wine. So you think about how it would
help the category to much more experiential and the innovation that's come
into that category is really focusing on consumer need states now. A lot of this innovation makes its
way into restaurants before it hits store shelves. Customers have also
developed an ever-greater interest in cheeses that are craft-made, locally
sourced, ethically produced and environmentally sustainable. The artisanal or craft cheese market in
the United States is so far small, but it is growing. And that's where the artisan cheese makers
really come in and are able to find a niche that they want to
expand beyond just the typical cheddar. So they might just move a little bit
away and say, "I'm going to make a bandage cheddar or a clothbound cheddar, an
agent," and it gives it an extra savory depth
or different flavor. They might go, "I'm going to make an
original cheese," and it's kind of a parmesan-cheddar hybrid. There are even major cheese competitions
among purveyors from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere
around the world. Chad Galer is Vice President of Food
Safety and Product Research at Dairy Management, a trade association
for the dairy industry. But he is also a judge at some
of the largest cheese competitions in the world, where thousands of entries compete
for recognition as the best. Right, they get the flavor, before I even
taste it, I'm looking at how it looks and the outside appearance and then
I get to start tasting it and check that texture. In my mind, I have a model of
what the perfect cheddar, or the perfect brie, or the perfect thing is...how
close does it come to that? And that's how we score
it on these varying. And so the difference in any
category, even the winners, like tenth-hundreds of a point when they win,
when you add up all hundred, you know, 40 or 50 criteria that
you're doing when you think off...every cheese starts with a hundred and
then we start taking points away. So it's, you know, like
I said, they're all delicious. But we're going in there with
just...everyone that's a judge there probably has 15, 20 years in the industry
and it has a lot of experience to know what to look for with the
cheese, and we're discerning some of the finest details. In part, it is a
response to the considerable portion of imported cheeses sold in the U.S. from countries around the world,
especially high-end purveyors in Europe. The history of it, it used to be
if you wanted fancy cheese or flavorful cheese, you bought it from Europe. And now we have U.S. cheeses standing up to and being really
at the same quality of those European cheeses. During the course of a
two and a half day contest, Galer and other judges will each test somewhere
between 60 and 80 samples of cheese per day. European countries are among the biggest
consumers of cheese in the world. Back in 2014, the International Dairy
Foods Association found the French ate 57 pounds of cheese per year,
compared with just 34 pounds per person in the United States. In fact, all of the top 10 cheese
eating countries in the world were all in Europe. From a global standpoint
and from a country standpoint, we don't even break into the
top 15 per capita consumption. You know, Denmark leads it with 2w8 kg
per capita and the US is down there at 17. So when you think 17 to
28, there's still a lot of cheese that we're not consuming, even though we
more than doubled our consumption since '75. But if the American appetite
for cheese continues to grow, the country could catch up soon enough.
u fuckin wot m8?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese
-he posts as he's eating a pizza