Description: A Celebration of Food & Drink
In 1976, Frank Baker had an idea. A cheese baron from Wisconsin (naturally), Frank’s family had been selling cheese since 1916. Introduced to America in the 1940s, mozzarella became a hit in the U.S. after World War II with the proliferation of pizza joints, and Baker Cheese switched gears, ditching cheddar for mozzarella in order to meet the craze. Consumers were looking for individual servings they could eat as snacks rather than the 20-lb. blocks Frank’s family made, so he started playing around with the
Interestingly, Frank originally marketed his string cheese to bars throughout Wisconsin. Patrons loved them and he eventually settled on a smaller, thinner cheese stick that people could hold more easily. The real stroke of genius was in the packaging: Frank opted for individually wrapped tubes that were vacuum packed, making his string cheese portable. It started finding its way into kids’ lunch boxes, and the rest is history.
Team Eat My Words (and we really have expanded to include a few of my coworkers, who have taken to these food tastings like post-war Americans took to pizza) wondered how different brands of string cheese tasted and set out on a journey of discovery. The rules were simple: string cheese only (there are lookalike cylindrical tubes of harder cheddars, but they go by the moniker “stick cheese” and were excluded due to an inability to peel them into stringy strips). We ended up with a face-off between four comp