Is America ready for cottage cheese again?
Cottage cheese began life in America as an easy, economical way for colonial cooks to make use of milk left over after they skimmed off the cream. By the 1970s, its amicable presence in recipes and on diet plates had made it a star.
Fame is fickle, and so are the nation’s eaters. Cottage cheese fell out of favor, and now spends its days hanging out in stodgy pint containers near the sour cream, while yogurt sprawls out across acres of the dairy case, dressed up in cute little tubes, flip tops and French glass jars.
America loves a comeback, though, and there are plenty of people who are betting that cottage cheese is primed for one.
“Every seven years or so another wave comes through where we try to reposition cottage cheese,” said Dave Potter, president of Dairy Connection in Madison, Wis., which sells custom cultures and enzymes to cheesemakers. “That’s about where we are now.”
This time, with help from both big food companies and small-batch cheesemakers, it might actually work.
On the mass-market side of the equation, the nation’s largest dairy producers are targeting younger people looking for a protein-rich, natural snack they can eat instead of a meal. (Cottage cheese can have twice the protein of some yogurts, though it has a lot more sodium.)
A couple new players have jumped in, including Muuna, the first product from Israel’s largest food manufacturer to be sold in the United States. American companies like Dean Foods, the nation’s largest dairy company, have given their cottage cheeses makeovers, packing them into smaller, sexier packages and asking retailers to move them away from the sour cream and closer to the yogurt.
New lines have interesting mixes of fruit and nuts, and some producers are experimenting with millennial-friendly additions like probiotics and chia seeds. Flavors are expanding beyond dusty stalwarts like pineapple to include Kalamata olive, habanero chile or cumin.
The goal, according to industry analysts, is to “uncottage” cottage cheese — or, as one dairy executive put it, “Chobani it.”
But the road back is not going to be easy. Yogurt outsells cottage cheese by roughly 8-1, said John Owen, a senior food and drink analyst who prepared the annual cheese report for Mintel, a market research company. Even though yogurt sales have started to flatten, American shoppers still bought $8.5 billion worth in 2017.
To use the terminology of food marketers, yogurt wears a health halo. Cottage cheese, long linked to the drudgery of dieting, is fighting a punishment halo.
It wasn’t always this way. Cottage cheese was once a reliable character actor, standing in for meat during two world wars, filling in for ricotta and starring on diet plates. It gave heft to salad bars and made a regular appearance (with fruit) on President Richard Nixon’s lunch tray.
By the mid-1970s, the golden era of cottage cheese, producers in every state were pumping out more than 1 billion pounds a year. Yogurt was considered a weird, sour interloper reserved for European expatriates and health nuts.
But then came the 1980s. Fruity, sweetened and sometimes frozen yogurt had caught on and cottage cheese was going nowhere but down. The rise of Greek yogurt in the early 2000s knocked it to the mat.
Unlike yogurt, which is a matter of adding a culture to milk and waiting for it to thicken up, cottage cheese is one of those foods that is deceptively simple to produce but difficult to do well. It’s like making really good scrambled eggs, but takes hours. You have to take it low and slow.
That’s where cheesemakers like Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, founders of Cowgirl Creamery in Marin County, Calif., come in.
Conley suggests eating it the way cheesemakers do after they finish a batch: Rip open a bag of barbecue flavored potato chips and use it like a dip.