For as long as anyone in the cheese industry can remember, the name “Kraft” has been synonymous with cheese. But Kraft became at least a little less synonymous with cheese in late November when, as reported on our front page last week, the company sold its natural cheese business to Lactalis.
That’s not to say Kraft is no longer involved in the cheese business. While selling brands such as Cracker Barrel, Athenos, Hoffman’s, and Polly-O (Athenos is now owned by Emmi Roth USA, while Polly-O is now owned by BelGioioso Cheese), Kraft Heinz will retain its Kraft Singles, Velveeta processed cheese, and Cheez Whiz processed cheese businesses in the US and Canada and its Kraft, Velveeta, and Cracker Barrel macaroni and cheese, Kraft sauces, and cream cheese, including Philadelphia cream cheese, businesses worldwide.
These are certainly not small “niche” products. Philadelphia cream cheese is the undisputed brand leader in cream cheese, production of which topped 1.0 billion pounds last year. And Velveeta certainly has gone beyond “niche” status, with its 75 or so products ranging from traditional and wellknown blocks to slices, shreds and sauces as well as in pasta and shell (macaroni and cheese) products, and Velveeta Skillets.
But it’s probably safe to say that Kraft’s overall presence in the cheese business will never be the same again. That presence, it should be noted, dates back over a century, to when J.L. Kraft started buying cheese in Chicago and reselling it to local merchants. It’s difficult if not impossible to find Kraft’s fingerprints all over the US (and global) cheese industry over the past 110-plus years.
From our perspective, one of the easiest ways to illustrate this point is to simply look at some back issues of this newspaper. And indeed, it’s difficult to page through more than just a few editions without stumbling upon some sort of Kraftrelated news.
Before illustrating this point, it should be mentioned that Kraft has been known by several different names over the years, including, among others, Kraft-Phenix Cheese, Kraftco Corporation, Kraft General Foods and, currently, the Kraft Heinz Company.
So, back in our Oct. 26, 1929 issue, we reported that contracts had been awarded by the Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation, of Chicago, for the enlargement of their plant in Beaver Dam, WI.
Five weeks earlier, we reported that Kraft-Phenix Cheese had announced that it would increase its cheese plant capacity in Denison, TX, by an enlargement program, which will increase its daily milk consumption from 20,000 pounds to 75,000 pounds. The company was expected to begin an enlargement program in September 1929, it was announced by C.H. Kraft, who recently visited Denison from Chicago. C.H. (Charles Herbert) Kraft was one of J.L. Kraft’s brothers.
Several decades later, Kraft was again in the news, but for less-positive developments. Specifically, Kraft came under considerable criticism for its role in trading at the old National Cheese Exchange.
A University of Wisconsin- Madison study released in March 1996 concluded, among other things, that there was evidence that Kraft (which at that time was owned by Philip Morris Companies, Inc.) chose to sell cheese on the NCE “at a loss when it could have more profitably made the sales elsewhere. Such conduct constitutes trading against interest, the practice of purposely not selling at the profit-maximizing price.”
Two months later, in May of 1996, two subcommittees of the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on that UW- Madison study. And less than a year later, the NCE closed and the cheese industry’s cash market moved to the CME in Chicago, where it remains today.
In the area of industry trade associations, Kraft has long been involved both on boards of directors as well as serving as officers. For example, Kraft leaders served on the board of the National Cheese Institute, and as presidents of that organization, for many years.
Yet another cheese-related area in which Kraft has had considerable impact is patents. Indeed, Kraft has been receiving patents for cheeserelated inventions for more than 100 years, starting with a patent awarded to James Lewis Kraft himself in June 1916 for a process of sterilizing cheese and an improved product produced by such process. The object of that invention was “to convert cheese of the Cheddar genus into such condition that it may be kept indefinitely without spoiling, under conditions which would ordinarily cause it to spoil, and to accomplish this result without substantially impairing the taste of the cheese.”
In the early decades of Kraft, the company received several other patents related to process cheese, including a patent in 1936 awarded to Norman Kraft, another of J.L. Kraft’s brothers, for an apparatus for heat-treating cheese. In more recent decades, Kraft has received patents for, among many other things, a method for making large sized blocks of cheese, methods for making lowfat cheeses, methods for making cream cheeses, and methods for making various processed cheese-type products.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it’s difficult if not impossible to list all of the plants that Kraft has owned or procured cheese from over the years, but the company’s long-time focus on improving cheese quality has benefitted the entire cheese industry.
The Kraft name will live on, both as a brand and as a company. But Kraft’s outsized presence in the cheese industry has been relegated to the history books.
