Rudy’s Drive-In in La Crosse brings diners back to another era. Carhops zoom by on roller skates, balancing frosty mugs of root beer and baskets of food that are paid for with cash.
On the griddle inside is another piece of nostalgia: golden slices of American cheese melting over burgers.
“It’s just the way it melts — you get the string pull off it,” said owner Justin Smith. “We use it on our chili dogs, too. Just the way it looks and melts down, it’s perfect.”
American cheese is known in the industry as processed pasteurized cheese. That perfect melt is part of why the product has remained popular since Kraft first debuted its cheese slices in the 1950s.
But like other foods popular in the Space Age — Jell-O salads, TV dinners and Tang — American cheese is regarded as a highly processed, highly artificial food. As more brands strive to promote their foods as healthy or “natural,” the additives in American cheese have kept it stuck in the past.
Now, Wisconsin-based cheese company Sargento hopes to update the processed classic to reflect how consumers are eating today. The company debuted its natural American cheese on store shelves last year.
“We have watched a long migration of people from processed American slices to natural slices,” said Rod Hogan, senior vice president of innovation at Sargento. “We think part of it has been about flavor and variety. Part of it has also been about just this desire for cleaner-label, more natural foods.”
Even as more consumers switched to natural cheese, Hogan said the team at Sargento realized there were aspects of American cheese that kept some shoppers buying the processed option.
It’s why the company set out on what would become a decade-long journey to develop a cheese that could do both: provide the even, creamy texture of melted American with the short, simple ingredient list of natural cheese.
The science behind the melt
The unrivaled melt of American cheese isn’t an accident. It all comes down to the chemistry that allowed food processors to transform natural cheese into something new decades ago.
Cheese is created when an enzyme called rennet causes the proteins in milk to stick together in a loose network, trapping the milk’s butterfat and forming a solid. This fragile protein structure is compromised when cheese is heated, changing the texture of cheese and creating an oily sheen.
“You’ll see literally butterfat start to come out of it, and you’ll see this stringy, kind of gloppy mess,” said Lloyd Metzger, vice president of quality and technical services at Valley Queen Cheese in South Dakota and the leading expert on processed cheese.
Metzger said processors found they could avoid this separation — and give cheese a longer shelf life — by flipping the natural chemistry of cheese on its head. They melted the natural cheese and thoroughly mixed it with an emulsifying salt, causing the proteins to latch on directly to the fat. It creates what Metzger called a “fat-protein complex that’s stuck together.”
And that’s what gives American cheese its melt.
“When you re-melt it afterwards, it’s going to be this beautiful, smooth, even, velvety melt that you won’t ever get out of natural cheese,” Metzger said.
This process is largely credited to the company that eventually became Kraft Foods. Founder J. L. Kraft first set out to make a shelf-stable cheese around 1906. The individually-wrapped Kraft singles of the 1960s eventually became the benchmark for the category.
But Metzger said it’s not surprising that consumers are often suspicious of the product’s longevity and mysterious ingredients like “trisodium citrate.”
“If I called it ‘salt and lemon juice,’ the American consumer would be fine with it,” he joked. “But it’s understandable that a consumer would not understand what that is and what it does.”
A decade of trial-and-error pays off
For Sargento, developing a new, natural variety took years of trial and error by the company’s research and development team in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
At the company’s technical center, John Rodgers, vice president of research and development, fires up a flattop griddle for what he calls the gold standard for American cheese performance: a grilled cheese sandwich.
He estimates his team made thousands of the sandwiches over the roughly 10 years it took to develop and market the new product, which hit store shelves last year.
Rodgers said the project was nearly shelved after an early model was a flop.
“We thought we had a cheese that was pretty close. We actually put it to a consumer test, and it failed miserably,” he said. “We were on the cusp of like, ‘Do we really think we can continue forward with this?’”
That failure ended up being a turning point for the project, according to Hogan. He said the company stopped focusing on how to get the product to consumers and instead concentrated on the scientific breakthroughs needed to create the one-of-kind variety.
But Sargento isn’t the only company hoping to reimagine — and rebrand — the beloved golden slices.
New School American Cheese launched in Los Angeles in 2022, offering a “clean label” version of processed cheese. Its product, which is made by a contract processor in Wisconsin, starts with aged cheddar and adds butter, cream and the emulsifying salt needed to transform it into American.
Alan Leavitt, one of the brand’s founders, said its focus has been marketing to the food service industry, where chefs have long struggled with wanting the melting performance of American in a product worth including on a high-end menu.
“You could be intentional about sourcing your beef and your vegetables,” he said. “Maybe you even baked your own bun in house. You might hand whisk your own mayo, and then, before New School came along, there was never an American cheese that would meet the quality standards of your plate.”
The future of American in a MAHA world
As part of President Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again push, the federal nutrition guidance released in January calls for a “dramatic reduction in highly processed foods” in Americans’ diets and the recommendation to consume more “real food” without additives.
Leavitt thinks this push for cleaner labels won’t kill processed American cheese, but will drive more companies to create their own take on a lower-ingredient slice.
“I tend to believe that it will lead to a larger segment of the population who wants to understand what’s in their American cheese and how it’s made, and might be willing to pay a premium for something that they feel more comfortable (with),” he said.
For Sargento, helping consumers understand the difference between their new product and the processed American cheese of the past has been a critical part of the rollout. Hogan said the packaging was designed for the product to sit on the shelf next to the processed options, rather than hang with the natural cheese slices.
He said the company hopes not only to give processed cheese buyers a new natural option, but also to invite those who have moved away from American cheese to enjoy the nostalgia once again.
“We want to give the natural cheese user the option to come back into a category that they actually love,” Hogan said.
Hope Kirwan originally reported this story for Wisconsin Public Radio.
This version of the story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
