Sure, you can make a gourmet macaroni and cheese casserole that contains several types of artisanal cheeses lovingly blended into a Béchamel sauce and baked for an hour, but you probably have some Kraft mac and cheese in the cupboard all the same. Despite its reputation as a kids’ food, many of us keep boxes of macaroni and cheese (Kraft dinner to Canadians) around in case we need some quick comfort food. You might wonder where it came from. People have been eating cheese with pasta for hundreds of years, but the box the with orange powder is a 20th-century development, an offshoot of research into preserving cheese for longer periods of time.
Credit for inventing processed cheese should go to a pair of Swiss food chemists named Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler who, in 1913, were looking for a way to improve the shelf life of Emmenthaler cheese using sodium citrate. When they heated up the treated cheese, they noticed it melted better as well. But Chicago cheese salesman James L. Kraft was awarded the first patent for processed cheese in 1916.
Kraft understood the spoilage problem and had tried various solutions to it. He tried putting it tin foil packages, sealing it in jars, even canning it. But none of these solutions caught on with the public.
He eventually realized that the same bacteria that made cheese age nicely was also the bacteria that ultimately caused it to go bad. So he took some cheddar cheese scraps, heated them to kill the bacteria, ground them up with some sodium phosphate as an emulsifier and voila—Kraft processed cheese was born.
Still, it was another 30 years before processed cheese was made into a powder to reconstitute with macaroni. Read the rest of the story of boxed macaroni and cheese at Smithsonian.