Cheese Balls: How They Are Made
Utz has been around since 1921 when Bill and Salie Utz began making potato chips out of their home in Hanover, Pennsylvania. As the company grew, they began making other snack foods such as pretzels, and their now famous cheese balls. In celebration of National Cheese Ball Day, April 17th, we headed to Hanover, PA to the Utz factory to see how they are made.
Utz started making cheese balls in 1990. Sam’s Club, one of their biggest customers, approached them and asked if they could package the cheese balls in a barrel rather than in bags. The design team came up the plastic barrel and infamous purple label that can now be seen in many stores, and have even been featured in shows like NBC’s “The Office” and the “Alvin and the Chipmunk” movies.
So, how are they made? Well it all starts with coarsely ground corn meal that is brought to the factory in 2,000 pound bags. That corn meal is then deposited into what they call an extruder, which is a machine that exerts enough pressure onto the corn meal that it turns into a gel. That gel is squeezed into a long string and cut into bite-sized pieces. When those pieces leave the extruder and are re-introduced to atmospheric pressure, they expand and turn into a round puff. From there they are baked in an oven to remove any excess moisture.
And where does that delicious cheesy flavor come from? The seasoning process starts with vegetable oil and an all-natural cheddar cheese powder that is mixed together and sprayed over the cheese balls in a tumbling barrel until they are evenly coated. Right before they leave the barrel, they are also sprayed with salt, and sent off to packaging. Above the packaging is a tube that holds the same volumetric amount of cheese balls as the container. The cheese balls get locked into place and then dumped into the barrel. Because the cheese balls settle after being shipped around the country, they have people who manually top off the barrels to make sure each one is 100% full when it arrives to the customer.
And in case you are ever in a guessing game, a large barrel contains approximately 1,100 cheese balls. Last year alone, Utz made 14 million pounds of them. That’s 7 billion cheese balls! To put that in perspective, that is enough to wrap the earth more than three times.
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