How Cheese Crisps are Putting an Irresistible Crunch in Cheese

Who would have imagined that the humble Italian frico would spawn a whole freaking American snack food category? Once the narrow province of frugal Friulian home cooks who grated the rinds of their local Montasio cheese onto hot skillets to crisp it into lacy wafers, frico was not long ago a truly niche dish*.

Over time, in Italy and abroad, frico made its way to swanker settings, from fine restaurants, where it’s been used as a garnish for charcuterie boards and entrées; to upscale bars, where frico’s artisanal look makes for stylish nibbling and its intense saltiness serves as a boon to beverage sales. By the 1980s, you could find spendy pre-packaged frico in gourmet specialty shops, where it was rechristened “cheese crisps”, in part, no doubt, to avoid sticker-shock in comparison with that plebian chip, the Frito.

Rise of the Frico descendants

In the past 10 years, a gang of frico-descendants has been angling its way onto the turf of Frito-Lay. Brands including Whisps, Parm Crisps, Just the Cheese, Moon Cheese, and Sonoma Creamery crisps are making themselves known in mainstream grocery snack aisles, boasting of high protein, low carbs, gluten-freedom, and, most loudly, Real Cheese. And in fact, true to their frico heritage, the flagship products of four of these brands contain no ingredients other than cheese. Sonoma Creamery Crisps are the exception, incorporating small amounts of quinoa, oat bran, and rice; director of marketing Rosanne Kim offers assurance that it’s “just a pinch.”

Moon Cheese package photo credit Nutradried Food Company, LLC

How are cheese crisps made?

Most of these products are simply and similarly manufactured: Cheese – Moisture = Crisp. Whole cheeses are grated, shreds are distributed onto baking sheets and heat is applied in industrial ovens (There are differences in temperature and timing, not just by company, but by cheese variety. For instance, parmesan and cheddar have distinctive melting temperatures and burn points.) Moon Cheese has a more distinctive production process: tumble drying. “We take a big brick of cheese, cut it into cubes and put them in a barrel shaped container,” explains Marcia Hunt, Chief Marketing Officer for the Washington State-based NutraDried Food Company, Moon Cheese’s manufacturer. “The barrel is rotated while moving slowly through a cylindrical pipe as microwave energy is applied,” That’s a layman’s description of Radiant Energy Vacuum (REV™) dehydration technology, a proprietary process of NutraDried’s parent company, EnWave Corporation. “Moon Cheese is really a proof of concept,” says Hunt. “EnWave is a tech business, they sell the machinery.” One client is using REVTM for fruit-based products.

While competitors’ cheese crisps have chip-like form factor, Moon Cheese was named for its pieces’ resemblance to small lunar rocks (Can we anticipate a limited edition in green?). As the corners of those cheese cubes are tumbled away, a significant amount of milk-rich dust is generated in the barrels—a boon, reports Hunt, for the cheese loving denizens of Whatcom County, Washington’s hog farms.

Marketing a new product

With multiple brands vying for shelf space and annual sales approaching half a billion dollars, cheese crisps appear to have established a stable hold in the American market.

To maintain that hold, manufacturers are consciously avoiding tying their brands too closely to diet trends.

Just the Cheese photo credit Just the Cheese

David Scharfman, CEO of Wisconsin-based Just the Cheese, is familiar with the dangers of exactly that approach. In the mid-1990s, his father, Paul Scharfman, a dairy entrepreneur whose Specialty Cheese Company is the largest American manufacturer of paneer and ghee, first launched Just the Cheese in an effort to catch the wave of the Atkins craze. While David, a tween at the time, was enamored of the prototype product because “it tasted like the crunchy bits of cheddar at the edges of a well-done grilled cheese sandwich,” his father went all-in on promoting their new product’s low carbohydrate count. “It really caught fire after the launch,” recalls Scharfman, “It was a new idea back then, there really wasn’t much in the way of crunchy, salty low-carb snacks. My Dad got it into Walgreen’s. We were the #1 snack in the Atkins catalog. But when I was in high school, the whole Atkins thing crashed. All of a sudden meat was bad. Fat was bad. In the early 2000s the business dropped from millions a year to tens of thousands. We had to buy back huge amounts of inventory and stop manufacturing.”

Sonoma Creamery Parmesan Crisps photo credit Sonoma Creamery

Almost two decades later, armed with a business degree from the University of Virginia, time in the corporate trenches, and a keen understanding of online retail, which hadn’t been a factor in Just the Cheese v.1, Scharfman took note of the Keto diet boom and proposed a reboot fully aware that “There’s only so much time that any fad diet is going to stick around.” Leveraging Keto as launch fuel, Scharfman began selling Just the Cheese exclusively on the web in 2018, moving 3.5 million boxes of product on Amazon that first year before following Whisps, ParmCrisps, and Moon Cheese into brick and mortar with no mention of Keto or even “diet” on the label. “We are not a diet brand,” echoes Sonoma Creamery’s Kim, “We’re a healthy snack made with minimally processed ingredients. During the pandemic, people have been snacking more every day. But people who aspire to be healthy have been snacking differently as this time has gone on; they’ve migrated from Oreos to Doritos, to cheese crisps.”

How to categorize a crisp

In addition to disc-shaped chips, both Sonoma Creamery and Just the Cheese sell cheese crisp bars, which are positioned as a savory, high protein alternative to granola bars. This further adds to what spokespeople for all of these companies universally acknowledged as a major conundrum for their retail customers: Where should the cheese crisps be shelved?

“We started out in the deli aisle,” says Samuel Kestenbaum, CEO of ParmCrisps’ parent company, That’s How We Roll LLC. “Deli buyers want a lot of cheese and the consumers who shop deli know about charcuterie boards, which is where we thought a lot of cheese crisps were going to go. We started with our regular parmesan crisps and we were planning to extend into pesto, rosemary, and other flavors that cheese lovers are familiar with. But it turns out that anyone who tries us ends up eating us like we’re chips, so we added snack flavors like sour cream and onion, jalapeno and pizza.” Yet as ParmCrisps and their kind began to get shelved on the chip aisle, they faced a serious hurdle: “This is a premium product,” says Koestenbaum. “You make something with 100% real cheese, it costs more than grain or potatoes. Cheese consumers understand the expense.” Chip snarfers maybe not so much.

“Real cheese is not cheap,” agrees Scharfman of Just the Cheese, going on to acknowledge that “Every store seems to see us differently. There are mixed opinions about where we should be. In Wegmans, our bars are with granola bars and energy bars; sometimes we’re in healthy snacks, sometimes deli, sometimes crackers. Maybe if more than one brand continues to do well, we can have a small area of our own; there’s a beef jerky set in some groceries out there, six feet of shelves with a half dozen different brands.” Given consumer acceptance of the higher prices commanded by jerky, dried fruit and nuts relative to potato chips, tortilla chips, and pretzels, Scharfman may be on to something.

“I wish I could get out my Magic 8 Ball and figure out where retailers are going to shelve us,” says Moon Cheese’s Hunt. “We have a store finder for consumers on our website that will show you the five nearest places you can buy Moon Cheese. But once they get there, it’s not obvious where to look.”

By the brand

Curious how the different brands stack up? Here’s our take.

· The truest frico simulacra of the bunch are the parmesan and cheddar Whisps and ParmCrisps (Yes, a cheddar ParmCrisp is a thing. D’oh!). Were they sparingly served by your Friulian nonna, you might never suspect they were mass-produced products. Less successful are their snackier varieties, especially barbecue Whisps and the truly vile pizza ParmCrisps.

· For portion control, Just the Cheese is a clear winner. Its bars come in pocket-friendly 2 packs and its pinky-tip size crisps come in single-serve half-ounce envelopes.

· If you’re throwing control to the wind, Sonoma Creamery’s crisps are dangerously snackable, with a thicker, crunchier texture (no doubt due to that pinch of grain). The mouthfeel verges on a Triscuit and the ample square of each chip indeed makes them functional as crackers—in case you want to put cheese on your cheese.

· If you’re into gouda, only Moon Cheese will do. There’s also a pepper jack variety in addition to parmesan and cheddar options. Texturally, it’s closer to popcorn than a chip; cheese aficionados may note some likeness to a fossilized curd.

In terms of taste, all of these brands offer authentically amped-up cheese flavor. As David Sharfman notes, “When you reduce wine, it magnifies the flavors. When you bake all the moisture out of cheese, the flavor intensifies.” That said, while the likes of cheddar and parmesan seem inherently friendly to crispification, there are no doubt limits to this madness. The authentic flavor isn’t always enough: Brie was born to run, not to crunch.

*Nota bene: There are actually two Friulian specialties commonly referred to as frico. The subject at hand, formally frico croccante and frico di patate, a fork-tender patty of shredded cheese and potatoes, cousin to the Swiss rösti and little known beyond the Italian alps.