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Weird History Food is getting cheesy, covering the history of Velveeta. Everyone's favorite party dip for tortilla chips has a longer history than one would expect. Coming from the dairy mind of Emil Frey, Velveeta has changed a lot over the years. How much? Well, take a dip into this video and find out. Chips are not required during the viewing of Velveeta, but a bib might be a good choice.
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It wasn't always this way with Velveeta
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At one point in history, before you, your parents, and possibly even your grandparents were alive
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Velveeta was good and pure gold. Europeans, who practically invented and perfected cheese
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had the soft American cheese imported. Then, Velveeta was sold, and everything went to hell
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Today on Weird History Food, we're going to talk about the gooey, creamy, messy history of Velveeta
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And now, let's get cheesy, or as close as we can get without actually containing cheese
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Let's start the Velveeta story at the very beginning with Amel Fry
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a young cheesemaker who was given the seemingly impossible task of reinventing the cheese wheel
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and revolutionizing snack culture in the process. Born in Switzerland in 1867, Fry moved to New York with his family when he was a teenager
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Because his father was a dairy farmer with a side hustle as a local small-batch cheesemaker
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Fry spent his formative years immersed in Casey culture. That's the fancy cheesemonger's name for the craft of making cheese
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In 1887, Fry turned 20 and he landed his first professional cheesemaking gig at New
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Swander's Cheese Factory in Blooming Grove, New York. Fry was only employed there for a year before he left and began working for the Monroe Cheese
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Company in Monroe, New York. By the time Fry began working for Monroe Cheese, the company had recently been purchased by business partners Adolph Toad and Ferdinand Wolfe for a cool $25,000
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That was some good cheddar back in the day. Not long after Toad and Wolfe bought the factory, they opened a second cheese factory in Covington, Pennsylvania, about 212 miles away
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While Fry stayed behind in Monroe making dozens of different niche cheeses, the Covington factory specialized in big Swiss wheels
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With the two factories running at full steam, Toad and Wolf started receiving more cheese orders than ever before
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And the business was gaining traction. Only there was one problem. Every time a delivery truck left the Covington factory filled with Swiss
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it would return with chunks of damaged cheese wheels that broke apart while en route to their customers
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Nobody wants broken cheese, and it was a problem for the owners of the Monroe Cheese Company
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But it was a temporary problem with a world-changing solution. Thanks to poorly paved roads and delivery vehicles with terrible suspensions, Velveeta was invented
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Toad and Wolf were smart businessmen, and it didn't take them that long to realize that all those unusable pieces of broken Swiss that accumulated after each delivery were adding up
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So they went to Monroe's best cheese man, Fry. The two men explained to Fry that the company was losing hundreds of pounds of cheese a week and tasked him with finding a solution Several years earlier Fry invented Lidocrons for the Monroe Cheese Company when Toad asked him if he could make a cheese as close as possible in flavor to Bismarck cheese
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Toad used to have Bismarck imported from Europe, but it always went bad before it got to him
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Not long after Toad's request, Fry invented a Bismarck knockoff and called it Lidercrons
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Only this new Lidercrons was better than the legit Bismarck. The Monroe Cheese Company was getting orders for Fry's new invention from both coasts and
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everywhere in between. They even shipped it overseas. Fry was a dairy deity. So in Toad and
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Wolf asked Fry if he had any ideas about what to do with all those broken cheese wheels
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the young master went to work. Fry would spend the next two years taking hunks of cheese home
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with him after work, like a grisly detective lugging home gritty case files. During those years
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Fry would work weekdays at the Monroe plant only to spend his evenings and weekends over a hot
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stove at home, mixing the broken Covington Swiss cheese wheels together with different
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combinations of other various cheese pieces and cheese byproducts such as whey. Finally
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in 1918, after hundreds of nights filled with trial and error, Eureka! Fry did it. Thanks to
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the recent scientific experiments by Fritz Settler and Walter Gerber, two researchers who were also
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conducting their own cheese hybrid experiments in Switzerland, Fry gleaned just enough from his
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fellow countrymen to keep his cheesy concoction from separating when melted. The magic ingredient
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sodium citrate. Now, when cured, the liquidy goo formed a soft yet firm cheese that could be molded
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into any shape or size. When asked what he was going to call his Frankenstein monster of a cheese
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Fry said he wanted a made-up name that conjured up visions of a smooth, creamy cheese with a
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velvety consistency. So he called his invention Velveeta. Velveeta cheese was an instant hit, and everyone wanted a piece
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By the mid-1920s, Monroe was shipping Fry's invention to almost every restaurant and hotel
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in America, and even several European countries. Yeah, even snooty Europeans couldn't eat enough of this stuff
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Germans were so into Fry's cheese that a Velveeta processing plant had to be built
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in Deutschland to satisfy their Jones with a creamy, velvety concoction. Even then, the German Velveeta factory couldn't keep up with the demand
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But the cheese wheel in the sky took a turn for the worse in 1927
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After riding that golden wave of Velveeta for nine years, the Monroe Cheese Factory sold the product to Kraft Foods
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and everything changed, even the recipe. A brick of fries Velveeta was pure cheese with no chemicals
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But when Kraft bought the brand, drastic changes were immediately made. And while an official reason wasn't given
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it almost surely had to do with profit margins. Because Kraft knew that staying faithful to Fry original all Velveeta recipe would cost them a lot of money and labor the company decided to swap out all of the cheese and fries Velveeta for fillers lots and lots of fillers
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While most cheeses then and now consist of milk, rennet, a started culture, and a bit of salt
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Kraft Foods added the following ingredients to the new version of their latest acquisition
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OK, deep breath. Water, modified food starch, canola oil, gelatin, paprika extract, lactic acid, sorbic acid
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which acts as a preservative. Sodium alginate, enzymes, apocerotinol, milk protein concentrate
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milk fat, calcium phosphate, annatto, which gives today's Velveeta you eat its rich golden hue
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whey protein concentrate, vitamin A palmitate, sodium phosphate, and natural flavor. No plastic
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though. The microscopic traces of plastic in the new Velveeta urban legend is about as true as
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spider eggs, and bubble yum, or that if you eat Pop Rocks with your soda, your stomach will explode
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Besides screwing with the original recipe, Kraft also completely remarketed the Velveeta brand
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Before the Monroe Cheese Company sold it, Velveeta was mostly consumed as an accoutrement for a much
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larger family meal. The cheese's first generation of fans bought the inexpensive product to give
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flavor to boring staple foods like soups, sandwiches, and of course, pasta. The shell
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shape really does taste better because it has convenient Velveeta collecting pockets pre-installed
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Kraft took the opposite approach. They presented their new Velveeta as a health food. Velveeta
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may be many wonderful things, but health food? Negatory. The corporation convinced everyone that
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their Velveeta was a nutritious man-made superfood, chock full of carbohydrates to give you energy
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and fortified with minerals to make you strong. The company even paid for a study conducted by a Rutgers University research team
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to confirm what Kraft had been saying since it bought the brand. Velveeta is good and good for you
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Kraft's marketing people were so convincing that they even duped the American Medical Association in 1931
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to proclaim that Velveeta was classified as a health food that contained everything needed to develop, and I quote, firm flesh
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Things are a lot different for Velveeta these days. This ain't your daddy's cheese product, at least from a pop culture standpoint
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Gone are Kraft's ginned-up declarations that Velveeta is going to keep you healthy and strong with taut, rigid skin
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Instead, the new Kraft marketing team has decided to have fun with the brand
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in an attempt to reframe the public's perception of the old American classic
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your grandparents used to ration during WW2 and give the product some relevance
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For example, in June of 2022, Kraft released a limited edition Velveeta nail polish
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The campaign consisted of two shades, a deep yellow called La Dolce Velveeta and a bright red one called Finger Food Both colors smelled of cheese That not a good fragrance for fingers Also in 2022 the kids in the Kraft marketing department
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were behind this Central Park public art installation. Kraft's eight-foot novelty box of Velveeta
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was inspired by German artist Niklas Costello's 400-pound pure gold cube, which was worth $11.7 million
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and probably just as edible. Hours after Costello removed his installation from the New York City Park, Kraft's people swooped in
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and installed a work of art of their own, an eight-foot box of the liquid gold
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And then there was the cheesepocalypse incident. There's a lot of controversy surrounding
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the great cheesepocalypse of 2014. On January 9th, just before Super Bowl XLVIII
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the one where Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed during halftime, the Kraft marketing team took to Facebook
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and nearly started a cataclysmic riot. Kraft confirmed that the rumor-making the rounds was true
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The US was low in stock on Velveeta, And with only about a month to go before the Super Bowl, the season when households across America would be scooping up Velveeta to make game day dips
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Americans lost their goddamn minds. Suddenly, Velveeta was being sold on the black market
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Almost too quickly, Kraft launched a fully functioning website that tracked all Velveeta shortages and deliveries around America
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Sort of like the Santa Tracker for blocks of nacho lubricant. Kraft then coined Velveeta's new nickname when they posted a Facebook message stating that they were working on ensuring every American would be able to drench their Super Bowl foodstuffs with our nation's most precious commodity, liquid gold
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Whether or not cheesepocalypse was a genuine shortage or a manufactured scare didn't matter
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Fans of the cheese-like substance rallied around Velveeta and their depleted resources, thrusting the old staple back into the headlines, 96 years after Amel Fry invented its original formula
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But cheesepocalypse doesn't even compare to the briny swill that Kraft came up with in July of 2022
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Riding high from several successful marketing campaigns earlier in the year, Team Kraft created the Veltini, a Velveeta-infused vodka martini
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Sold only between the golden hours between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. at select restaurants
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the Veltini was brutally panned. They should have sold it between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. because that's clearly when it was invented
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Who'd have thought that vodka, olive brine, Velveeta stuffed olives, and pasta shells would taste so peculiar
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Although it's taken its share of bad raps like the Veltini, Velveeta has endured for over a century and isn't going anywhere
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For every fine cheese enthusiast who clucks their tongue at the mere sight of that mysterious golden goo
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there are tens of thousands of people who don't care that their favorite cheese isn't really cheese
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But who cares what those cheese snobs think anyway? As long as tortilla chips exist in this crazy world, there will always be a place for Velveeta