by Lydia Mulvany
The cheese police are on the case.
Acting on a tip, agents of the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration paid a surprise visit to a cheese factory in rural Pennsylvania on a cold November day in 2012.
They found what they were looking for:
evidence
that Castle Cheese Inc. was doctoring its 100 percent real parmesan
with cut-rate substitutes and such fillers as wood pulp and distributing
it to some of the country’s biggest grocery chains.
One might be tempted to think of this as a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of “
NYPD Bleu,”
except that the FDA wasn’t playing. Some grated Parmesan suppliers have
been mislabeling products by filling them with too much cellulose, a
common anti-clumping agent made from wood pulp, or using cheaper
cheddar, instead of real Romano. Someone had to pay. Castle President
Michelle Myrter is scheduled to plead guilty this month to criminal
charges. She faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
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Reinheitsgebot,
a series of purity laws first drawn up 500 years ago, and Champagne
makers prohibit most vineyards outside their turf from using the name.
Now the full force of the U.S. government has been brought to bear
defending the authenticity of grated hard Italian cheeses. Which is good
news for Neil Schuman.
For
years, Schuman has been a one-man Reinheitsgebot, insisting that the
fragrant granules Americans sprinkle on their pizza and penne ought to
be the real thing; if not, the label should say so.
The stakes are 100 percent real for him. Schuman’s Fairfield, New Jersey-based company,
Arthur Schuman Inc.,
is the biggest seller of hard Italian cheeses in the U.S., with 33
percent of the domestic market. He estimates that 20 percent of U.S.
production — worth $375 million in sales — is mislabeled.
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“The
tipping point was grated cheese, where less than 40 percent of the
product was actually a cheese product,” Schuman said. “Consumers are
innocent, and they’re not getting what they bargained for. And that’s
just wrong.”
How serious is the problem? Bloomberg News had
store-bought grated cheese tested for wood-pulp content by an
independent laboratory.
Cellulose
is a safe additive, and an acceptable level is 2 percent to 4 percent,
according to Dean Sommer, a cheese technologist at the Center for Dairy
Research in Madison, Wisconsin. Essential Everyday 100% Grated Parmesan
Cheese, from Jewel-Osco, was 8.8 percent cellulose, while Wal-Mart
Stores Inc.’s Great Value 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese registered 7.8
percent, according to test results. Whole Foods 365 brand didn’t list
cellulose as an ingredient on the label, but still tested at 0.3
percent. Kraft had 3.8 percent.
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“We
remain committed to the quality of our products,” Michael Mullen, a
Kraft Heinz Co. spokesman, said in an e-mail. John Forrest Ales, a
Wal-Mart spokesman, said he questioned the reliability of testing a
single sample and that Wal-Mart’s “compliance team is looking into these
findings.”
Jewel-Osco is also investigating, spokeswoman Mary
Frances Trucco said in an e-mail. “We pride ourselves on the quality of
products we deliver for our customers,” Trucco said.
“We strongly
believe that there is no cellulose present,” Blaire Kniffin, a Whole
Foods Market Inc. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail, adding that it could
have been a false positive. “But we are investigating this matter.”
According
to the FDA’s report on Castle, obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act, “no parmesan cheese was used to manufacture” the Market
Pantry brand 100% grated Parmesan Cheese, sold at Target Corp. stores,
and Always Save Grated Parmesan Cheese and Best Choice 100% Grated
Parmesan Cheese, sold by Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc., which along
with its subsidiaries supplies 3,400 retail stores in 30 states.
Instead, there was a mixture of Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and
cellulose, according to the FDA.
Castle has never been an
authorized Target vendor, according to Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder.
“We are investigating the information provided in the report,” she said
in an e-mail. Jeff Pedersen, an executive vice president of Associated
Wholesale Grocers, had no comment.
DairiConcepts,
a Springfield, Missouri-based cheese maker that’s a subsidiary of Dairy
Farmers of America, said on its website that in a test of 28 brands,
only one-third of label claims about protein levels in grated parmesan
were accurate. The company blamed fillers such as cellulose.
Until
recently, there was little incentive to follow labeling rules. Criminal
cases are rare. That’s because the FDA, which enforces the country’s
food laws, prioritizes health hazards, said John Spink, director of the
Food Fraud Initiative at Michigan State University. But civil lawsuits
abound. A Jan. 29 complaint accuses McDonald’s Corp. of selling pure
mozzarella sticks that contain starch, considered a filler, a claim the
company denies.
Cheese makers commit adulteration because it saves money.
Marty
Wilson, chief executive officer of New York-based Sugar Foods, which
buys cheese from Schuman and supplies major pizza chains with to-go
packets of parmesan, said whenever his contracts come up for renewal,
competitors peddling ersatz cheeses surface. And he has lost business to
them. “We’re constantly battling cheap imitators across all of our
product lines,” Wilson said.
Bob Greco of Cheese Merchants of
America said competitors hawking bastardized products have underbid him
by as much as 30 percent. “The bad guys win and the rule-followers
lose,” Greco said.
The FDA regulates what can legally be called
Parmesan or Romano according to standards established in the 1950s to
ensure that manufacturers wouldn’t sell cheeses wildly different in
composition.
Americans love their hard Italian cheeses. Last year,
U.S. Parmesan output rose 11 percent from 2014 to around 336 million
pounds, while Romano production grew 20 percent, to 54 million pounds,
according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Italian producers, however, aren’t loving it as much. The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, a trade group based in Rome,
asked
the European Union in December to protect its manufacturers against
U.S. companies that were using the names of their cheeses and Italian
flags on their packaging. “A deceit” is how the organization’s
president, Giuseppe Alai, characterized Americans’ use of Italian names
and symbols.
Of all the popular cheeses in the U.S., the hard
Italian varieties are the most likely to have fillers because of their
expense. Parmesan wheels sit in curing rooms for months, losing
moisture, which results in a smaller yield than other cheeses offer.
While 100 pounds of milk might produce 10 pounds of cheddar, it makes
only eight pounds of Parmesan. That two-pound difference means millions
of dollars to manufacturers, according to Sommer.
Slippery Rock,
Pennsylvania-based Castle produced mainly imitation cheeses for nearly
30 years. The company, whose factory was adorned with crenelated
battlements and curved archways to look like a medieval castle, had $19
million in sales in 2013.
The trouble started in 2010 when it
began making what it called 100 percent grated Parmesan. A plant manager
designed flawed recipes, and after Castle fired him in 2012, he alerted
the FDA, the company said in a December 2012 letter to the agency,
obtained through the FOIA.
The
FDA accused Castle Cheese of marketing as real grated Parmesan what was
in fact a mixture of imitation cheese and trimmings of Swiss, white
cheddar, Havarti and mozzarella. After the probe, Castle stopped
production of the problematic cheeses and dumped inventories. The
company filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
A
lawyer for Michelle Myrter and Castle Cheese didn’t respond to requests
for comment. In the 2012 letter to the FDA, Castle said there was
inadequate documentation, and the FDA could note only the potential that
the products weren’t 100 percent pure.
Lauren
E. Sucher, an FDA spokeswoman, said the agency couldn’t comment on
pending legal cases. “The FDA takes economic fraud very seriously,” she
said in an e-mail.
The FDA’s
investigation may be the spark that changes things, said John Umhoefer,
executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association.
“The
industry wants to be known for a wholesome, safe, honest product — it’s
what’s kept the industry growing for 100 years,” he said. “The
wholesomeness of dairy products is a treasured part of our story.”
