An Aside on Packaged Cheese

I’ve shared this story on both Comical Start and OHAC, so committing it to writing seems fair.

In episode 421 of Comical Start, I ended up reading Sargento’s Wikipedia page. I learned it was, allegedly, the first company to sell pre-packaged sliced and shredded cheese, and also the first to use resealable packaging. All of this was quite interesting, but why shouldn’t a Wisconsin company be at the forefront of consumer cheese?

The sliced and shredded innovations came about in the 1950s, but, according to the Wikipedia page, that resealable step change didn’t happen until 2001. That was shocking, approaching hard to believe, so I tucked away the information to revisit some time later.

It took two months. One Saturday I finally began my hunt to corroborate the claims on that page. Newspapers.com is basically the only tool at my disposal for locating primary sources, so I began there. I was looking for any clear evidence from newspaper advertisements, or perhaps some hilarious article about local industry, that Sargento was indeed first to market with packaging sliced and shredded cheese at scale. Nothing turned up, so I finally turned to the citation on the Wikipedia page.

Plunkett’s Food Industry Almanac 2008: Food Industry Market Research is available as an OCR document on Google Books. It has a page about Sargento which, on the right-side box confusingly labeled “Growth Plans/Special Features”, contains a short biography. In that biography are the claims around shredded cheese and resealable packaging.¹

But, oh?

What’s this?

Well, I’ll be. This secondary source has them going to market with resealable packaging back in 1986! That passed the sniff test much better than 2001, so I went back to trawling Wisconsin newspapers. I hit on my first search.

This advertisement in the Wisconsin State Journal at least confirms that resealable packaging was a novelty in October 1986. Whether Sargento really beat Kraft or any other company to market on this remains in question, but it definitely was fifteen years early than originally claimed.

With the timeline broadly confirmed, it made sense to continue accepting Plunkett’s as a decent source. I took advantage of my infrequently used Wikipedia editing privilege and corrected the record. I’m doing my part to contribute to the veracity of online information, and will keep on the beat of confirming whether Sargento really was first to any of this.

They don’t have a public email address on their website, so I’ll be writing a letter to their corporate headquarters.