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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?
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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.
How to make your own moon cheese at home how to#
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 During the pandemic, people have been snacking more every day. “We are not a diet brand,” echoes Sonoma Creamery’s Kim, “We’re a healthy snack made with minimally processed ingredients. We had to buy back huge amounts of inventory and stop manufacturing.”Īlmost 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. In the early 2000s the business dropped from millions a year to tens of thousands. But when I was in high school, the whole Atkins thing crashed. We were the #1 snack in the Atkins catalog. “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. 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. 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. To maintain that hold, manufacturers are consciously avoiding tying their brands too closely to diet trends.ĭavid Scharfman, CEO of Wisconsin-based Just the Cheese, is familiar with the dangers of exactly that approach. 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. 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. 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?).
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“EnWave is a tech business, they sell the machinery.” One client is using REVTM for fruit-based products. “Moon Cheese is really a proof of concept,” says Hunt. “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. “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. For instance, parmesan and cheddar have distinctive melting temperatures and burn points.) Moon Cheese has a more distinctive production process: tumble drying. 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. Most of these products are simply and similarly manufactured: Cheese – Moisture = Crisp.