The 100% parmesan had no parmesan in it

The Sunday Teardown · Dairy

In November 2012, FDA inspectors made an unannounced visit to a cheese plant in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, and found canisters labeled 100% parmesan being filled with Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and cellulose. There was no parmesan in them at all, and in 2016 the company's president pleaded guilty.

Most coverage treated the case as a story about wood pulp in cheese. The more instructive question is why a plant would take the risk, and the answer is time. Parmesan must spend 10 months on a rack before it can legally carry the name, and that clock shapes every canister on the shelf, from its price to the powder that keeps it pouring to the places a plant under pressure looks for room to move.

Parmesan has a federal recipe, and its costliest ingredient is time. Under 21 CFR 133.165, parmesan contains no more than 32% moisture, its solids contain at least 32% milkfat, and it is cured for no less than 10 months. A cheese that misses any one of those cannot legally be sold as parmesan, and the 10 months is the requirement that shapes the entire category.

Grating moves the cheese under a looser rule. Once grated, it falls under 21 CFR 133.146, which permits safe and suitable anticaking agents and sets no numeric ceiling on them. The 2% to 4% cellulose figure repeated in coverage of this subject is industry convention rather than a number in the regulation. What the rule controls instead is fat, since the milkfat in the solids of a grated cheese may fall no more than 1 percentage point below the minimum for the cheese it is named after, and never below 31%. That fat floor is the real fence, because it is the number an inspector can test.

Cellulose is legal, and it is on the label. It is purified plant fiber, most often from wood pulp, and it keeps grated cheese flowing instead of caking in the canister. Kraft and the store brands in the table below all declare it.

"100% parmesan" once meant no parmesan at all. The FDA warning letter that followed the Castle Cheese inspection, dated July 11, 2013, found the plant's products misbranded, with cellulose and starch added to increase bulk and other cheeses substituted for the one named on the package. According to the FDA report Bloomberg later obtained, store-brand product Castle packed as 100% parmesan was made from Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and cellulose. In February 2016, company president Michelle Myrter pleaded guilty as a responsible corporate officer to a misdemeanor count of aiding and abetting the introduction of adulterated and misbranded food into interstate commerce, and 2 related companies each forfeited $500,000. That October she was sentenced to 3 years of probation, 200 hours of community service and a $5,000 fine.

Bloomberg then sent 4 ordinary shakers to an independent laboratory, and the results say more about the category than the criminal case does.

The 2 store brands ran at roughly twice the level industry experts told Bloomberg was normal, and both declared it, which the rule permits. The brand that listed no cellulose at all still tested at 0.3%, most likely trace carryover from shared equipment or a supplied ingredient, a reminder that a lab result and an intent to deceive are different findings.

So a canister may legally carry plant fiber in whatever amount the fat floor allows, and one plant once filled it with no parmesan at all. What the canister cannot tell you is what 10 months on a rack actually does to a cheese, or why the shaker can sit in the pasta aisle while the wedge needs a refrigerator. Both answers are on the line.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I follow the cheese from the vat to the shaker, including the curd cooked hotter than a cheddar's, the weeks in brine, the aging rooms where the clock runs, and the dryer that makes the grated version shelf stable. I explain where the rennet, the cellulose and the preservative come from, why a well-aged wedge is nearly free of lactose, and why a category this thin on margin is where the fraud turned up. I also put the shaker, the wedge and Parmigiano-Reggiano on the same per-ounce basis, and I close with the federal review now working through the standards that protect this canister, and what I buy.