"Process Cheese" Invented In Chicago Boardinghouse

By Amy Cavanaugh in Food on Jun 2, 2012 8:00PM

Chicago may be a great food city now, but apparently we also have ties to "process cheese," and more specifically the Kraft single. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the history of the product, which was invented by James L. Kraft, the Canadian-born founder of Kraft Foods.

In 1916, after a series of experiments at his Chicago boardinghouse, the former grocery clerk received a patent for “process cheese”: a sterilized product made by heating Cheddar at 175 degrees for 15 minutes while whisking it continuously. The invention helped turn cheese into a shippable commodity with a longer shelf life.

It was James' brother Norman who figured out how to get the individual slices.

The idea was easier to conceive than to execute: process cheese was packaged and sealed while still fluid and hot, and cutting hot cheese was like trying to slice molten lava. Around 1935, Norman began to imagine a solution. He poured some liquefied cheese onto a cold stainless-steel table. He then flattened the cheese out with an iced rolling pin. Norman was able to slice it.

But it wasn't until 1965 that consumers went from peeling a slice off a block of cheese to actually unwrapping individual slices. In August 1956, Indiana-born engineer Arnold Nawrocki received a patent for an “apparatus for producing individually wrapped cheese slices," and Kraft later developed a similar process. Individually wrapped Kraft Singles went on the market in 1965.