11/8/2023 0 Comments Healthy mac and cheese boxThe group called the product Smartfood, and it rode the wave of ’80s diet culture and the growing desire for “natural” snacks to become a national hit. ‘’The popcorn turned out better than the package,’’ Meyers told the New York Times, and they began selling it in grocery stores in New England. Withey filled the packaging with a batch of cheddar popcorn, using her own white cheese mix, not the neon stuff. In 1985, Ann Withey and her husband, Andrew Martin, along with partner Ken Meyers, were trying to demonstrate the abilities of a reclosable package Martin and Meyers had invented. Annie’s was founded in 1989, at a time when low-fat, high-fiber, and “natural” diets were all the rage, and was built off another “healthy” snack - Smartfood. It’s the flagship product for a brand that boasted $400 million in sales in 2017 thanks to its successful image as an “actually good for you” choice, or at least a quick option that’s not the worst. Powdered cheese, in other words, met Annie’s.Īnnie’s boxed mac and cheese is a go-to dinner for parents and college students alike. But then the blue box got some company, and against all odds, powdered cheese became an ingredient with a halo of health, associated with a brand ubiquitous with “organic,” natural, homemade, and all the other things powdered cheese was not. It was “processed” food, cheap, meant for unsophisticated palates (i.e., you likely first ate it as a kid). When you first became familiar with powdered cheese, it probably poured neon orange out of a Kraft packet, and in no way could you trace it back to a hypothetical cow. James Lewis Kraft won a patent for a cheese-processing method in 1916, and because of that, his blue box of mac and cheese dinner can be found around the world. But others, like the powdered cheddar that adorns popcorn, puffs, and boxed mac and cheese, seem downright alien. Some feel quite natural, like the dried, crumbled Parmesan that may have adorned your dinner table or pizzeria counter. Methods of dehydrating cheese are “a means of preserving cheese solids under conditions to which natural cheese would not normally be subjected,” according to The Fundamentals of Cheese Science. Powdered cheese is an astounding innovation.
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