Sartori cheeses power Noodles & Company’s Wisconsin mac & cheese
If you trademark a menu item as Wisconsin Mac & Cheese, it had better be made with Wisconsin cheese.
At Noodles & Company, the name of America’s Dairyland is not used in vain. Sartori, the award-winning Wisconsin cheesemaker, delivers a proprietary blend of cheeses for the sauce.
“When you think cheese, you think Wisconsin,” said Noodles & Co. CEO Dave Boennighausen. “It’s a natural fit.”
Wisconsin Mac & Cheese is Noodles’ best seller. The company, which has 461 locations nationwide, serves up 10 million orders of mac and cheese annually, with one in five customers opting for mac, Boennighausen said.
Wisconsin holds a special place in the company’s history.
Founder Aaron Kennedy earned his MBA in 1989 from UW-Madison. Kennedy went on to open the first Noodles in 1995 in Denver. The second Noodles restaurant opened in 1996 on State Street in Madison. Since the original Denver restaurant moved, the State Street spot owns the title as the company’s longest continuously serving restaurant.
Wisconsin is now home to about 10% of Noodles restaurants in the United States (only Illinois and Colorado have more), but it drives 17% of the chain’s mac and cheese sales.
Still, a few years ago the company felt its cheese sauce needed an upgrade, says Boennighausen, a 15-year veteran at Noodles. “The quality of the cheese sauce had slipped and didn’t meet our standards,” he said.
Culinary teams and cheesemakers united to improve the sauce. The whole process took about a year, says Sartori master cheesemaker Pam Hodgson, which is typical for a project of this scope.
Boennighausen and Hodgson won’t reveal the exact blend of cheeses in the new recipe but say the most notable addition is aged cheddar. The new sauce went nationwide in October 2017.
Sartori cheeses can be found in more than Noodles’ mac and cheeses, including its Parmesan and feta. Noodles’ Alfredo features one of the cheesemaker’s signature cheeses: MontAmore.
Still, it’s difficult to ignore the power of the mac and cheese. Boennighausen said the new and improved mac and cheese was one of the turning points in the company’s trajectory the past couple of years.