The Philadelphia in the tub isn't cream cheese

The Sunday Teardown · Dairy

The foil brick of Philadelphia is cream cheese. The tub sold beside it, from the same company and in the same 8 ounces, is cream cheese spread, and that one additional word takes it outside the federal definition of cream cheese.

Most shoppers read spread as a description of texture, and in part it is one. It is also a change in legal identity. The brick is held to a floor for milkfat and a ceiling for water, while the spread answers to no standard at all, and the distance between the two is decided less by a recipe than by how much water the plant chooses to leave in the curd. That decision is made at a single machine in the middle of the plant, and it explains nearly everything else in this issue, from the gums on the label to the way a cheesecake sets.

The brick meets a federal definition. Under 21 CFR 133.133, cream cheese is a soft, uncured cheese with at least 33% milkfat by weight of the finished food and no more than 55% moisture. Those two numbers form a floor and a ceiling, and a product that misses either one cannot legally be called cream cheese.

The tub is not defined at all. Part 133 standardizes a long list of spreads, including pasteurized cheese spread and pasteurized process cheese spread, and none of them is the product in the tub. Cream cheese spread is an unstandardized food, governed by the general labeling rules and by whatever the company chooses to put in it. The word spread is enough to lift the fat floor and the moisture ceiling off the product.

The original tub is closer to the brick than people assume. The usual claim is that the brick is pure and the gums arrive only in the tub, and the labels contradict it. The Original brick lists pasteurized milk and cream, salt, guar gum and cheese culture. The Original tub lists the same, plus natamycin, a mold inhibitor that is there for a reason having nothing to do with the recipe. A tub is opened, scraped with a knife and returned to a warm refrigerator door again and again, while a brick is usually opened once and used.

The lighter tubs are different products. The reduced fat spread adds whey protein concentrate, a second gum and vitamin A palmitate. The whipped spread adds skim milk, whey protein concentrate, modified food starch, 3 gums, lactic acid and vitamin A palmitate.

The pattern in the table is the point. The whey protein, skim milk, starch and additional gums are all doing the same job, which is holding structure in a product that has had fat taken out and water left in. The vitamin A palmitate follows the same logic, because pulling milkfat out of a dairy product removes the fat-soluble vitamins with it, and they have to be added back.

So the brick and the original tub are nearly the same food under different rules, and the lighter tubs are a different food under the same brand. What the label cannot show is how a tank of cultured milk becomes either one, or why a cheesecake made with the tub sets loose. Both answers come down to water, and to one machine.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I walk the line from the milk silo to the hot-filled brick, from the overnight culture that sets the curd to the separator that decides how much water stays in, along with the acid whey every cream cheese plant has to find a use for. I explain where the gums and the mold inhibitor come from, why a cheesecake made with the tub weeps and cracks, and why the reduced fat tub is a better product for the plant than for you. I also put the brick, the tub and the store brands on the same per-ounce basis, and I close with the dairy standard FDA has proposed to revoke and what I buy.