The Gooey Goodness of Velveeta Was a Smash Hit From Its Very Cheesy Start

The year was 1916, and Jacob Weisl, owner of the Monroe Cheese Company of Monroe, New York, had a problem. Some of the wheels of Swiss cheese made in his factory in Pennsylvania inevitably broke or were misshapen, leaving a plethora of bits and blocks of cheese that Weisl was desperate to salvage. He had this waste shipped back to Monroe, where the solution was concocted by one of his cheesemakers, a caseiculture genius named Emil Frey. On his home stove in Monroe, Frey spent two years tinkering. His breakthrough came in 1918, when he devised a new way to mix the cheese pieces with whey, the leftover liquid from milk curds, while adding an ingenious emulsifier to blend the fats and water. (Frey patented a key part of this process.) The result was a cheese that, when melted, became a smooth, velvety sauce. Frey dubbed it Velveeta—and it became an instant hit. By 1923, Weisl had incorporated the Velveeta Cheese Company and was selling his new, sensationally satiny cheese to restaurants and hotels across America and Europe.

As industrial agriculture rose in the 1920s, Big Cheese soon took over: Kraft Foods bought the Velveeta Company in 1927, and Borden absorbed the Monroe Cheese Company in 1929. Kraft soon changed the Velveeta recipe, though, crucially replacing real cheese, which has only three or four ingredients, with the paragraph of chemical elements that still graces the package today.  

In the 1930s and ’40s, Kraft began marketing Velveeta successfully, if rather dubiously, as a health food and diet aid, and its low price and convenience—beloved by kids, shelf-stable, melts like a dream—charmed America’s homemakers throughout the suburban ’60s and beyond. The New York Times in 1976 declared Velveeta a “worldwide favorite,” although no country could vie with the U.S. for sheer consumption: In 1996, domestic sales hit an astonishing peak of 8.75 pounds for every American. 

Perhaps Velveeta’s most remarkable moment was the devastating Cheesepocalypse of 2014. That’s when Kraft announced a Velveeta shortage, just ahead of the Super Bowl. “If this is true, I’m going to die,” one queso-loving fan tweeted—revealing a feverish love for a “cheese product” that, in fact, technically does not contain cheese. 

David Levine | READ MORE

David Levine, a freelance writer, is the author of, most recently, The Hudson Valley: The First 250 Million Years.