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Hey hey, Jason Toon here. Naming things is always one of the hardest parts of any creative endeavor. So I feel for the targets of this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. But not enough to go easy on the terrible name of this product.
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I love cheese. I love junk food. I love when the two intersect. I can find as much rapture in a bag of Doritos as in a triple-cream Brillat-Savarin. So what I’m about to say comes not from some elitist gourmand snobbery but straight from the rawest depths of my viscera:
The phrase “Cheez Kisses” makes me sick.
I don’t remember this Borden’s product, sold from about 1974 to 1980, well enough to say what it tasted like. But the very name curdles my gut into a defensive crouch.
It’s not so much the “Cheez” as the “Kisses”. Of all the things to compare a kiss to. “Chocolate kisses”, OK, it’s sweet, it’s decadent. “Peanut butter kisses” isn’t great, but it’s arguably not off-putting enough to convey the dreariness of the candy itself. But cheese? If you kissed someone and they told you it reminded them of cheese - or better yet, cheez - would you be flattered? Even if you knew they really liked cheese?
“Instead of sweets ‘n’ stuff”
The ‘70s saw the food industry searching for savory snacks that could deliver a little more substance than chips and pretzels, to appeal to health-conscious consumers and fill that void between a snack and a meal. Slim Jims took the convenience store counters by storm. Beef jerky and pork rinds came off the ranch and went mainstream. Less successfully, Dannon debuted a chocolate-covered yogurt on a stick, and a “protein product” called Skinny Munchies made chips out of some kind of dried milk solids.
Borden Foods seemed up to the task. The dairy giant’s portfolio included, or would soon include, such snacks as Cracker Jack, Wise potato chips, Guy’s potato chips, Campfire marshmallows, Drake’s snack cakes, Old London Melba Rounds, and perhaps most relevantly, Cheez Doodles. If anybody could crack the not-quite-a-meal moonshot, Borden could.
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“Snacking’s a great American pastime. But if nutrition is lacking in your family’s snacking, treat ‘em to a high-protein snack: Borden’s Cheez Kisses, instead of sweets ‘n’ stuff.”
So went the 1974 commercial introducing Cheez Kisses to a few test markets. These “high-protein snacks” were little globs of cheese-adjacent material wrapped in plastic like bonbons. The official designation on the package - “Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread” - was the same as that applied to Cheez Whiz and Velveeta, which suggests that Cheez Kisses were on the soft side. But in a rare instance of restraint, Cheez Kisses were paler in color than their neon-orange brethren.
A 1977 Knight-Ridder news story said they were “born in response to American’s nutritional consciousness-raising, says a spokeswoman for the manufacturer, Borden Inc… ‘Consumer response has been so positive,’ according to the spokeswoman, that Kisses will be available nationwide by January (1978).”
“Unsuitable for the future”
To make Cheez Kisses happen, Borden brought to bear the full promotional arsenal of the late-20th-century packaged goods conglomerate. TV commercials. Christmas recipes. A campaign pushing Cheez Kisses as the “healthy” treat to give away on Halloween. Open up and say “ugh”, America: you’re getting Cheez Kissed whether you like it or not.
For the first few years, Cheez Kisses was the cherished baby of the family. Borden’s 1975 annual report touts the addition of supplemental production facilities to make “the new ‘all-family, anytime’ snack”. The next year’s report celebrates “full national roll-out only three years after their introduction as a totally new kind of snack”, while the 1977 report heralds Cheez Kisses’ introduction to Japan. (The diplomatic ramifications for US-Japan relations are unknown, presumably suppressed by Borden’s highly-placed agents within both governments.)
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But all was not well in the house of Borden. Declining performance and disgruntled investors led to a series of restructurings, retrenchments, and divestments starting in 1979. “It is not an admission that past policies and actions were wrong,” wrote CEO Eugene J. Sullivan in the 1980 annual report, “only that some had outlived the times for which they were intended and are inadequate or unsuitable for the future.”
The many products disposed of in the “disposition of several lines of business” included Cheez Kisses. The volume of advertising dropped precipitously through 1979, with the last mentions in supermarket ads coming in January 1980. All good kisses must come to an end. And all gross kisses.
Coincidentally, the future king of cheese snacks was already taking shape, but not under Borden’s umbrella. A Wisconsin cheesemaker named Frank Baker had begin experimenting with ropes of mozzarella he’d cut into little hand-friendly pieces. After soaking the pieces in a salty brine, he found that they pulled apart in stringy strips. Testing his recipe on the patrons of local bars - doubtless a good way to reach a cross-section of Wisconsinites - Baker refined his creation to make it ever more snackable. By the end of the ‘70s, it had become what we would recognize as string cheese. Thus would it conquer lunchboxes a decade or two hence. No icky name, no -z ending required.
I’ve probably been too hard on Cheez Kisses. Chances are I liked them as a little kid, and/or would still like them today. But names matter. I can’t get the image of drippy cheese-smeared lips out of my head. A cheez by any other name would not sound as gross.
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I don’t think I’d have ever been tricked into liking Cheez Kisses, though as a kid I did like some weird ‘treats’. I was oddly obsessed with white chocolate. It just seemed…fancier? More exotic? Or even just weird enough that it was my go-to any time I could pick out whatever bar I wanted. These days I’m 180 the other way and love dark chocolate. Did you have any weird food choices growing up? Let’s hear about ’em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Snack healthy with these pasteurized process Shoddy Goods stories:
Where’s the Speef? And other pretenders to the canned meat throne
Halloween’s Least Wanted: the tragedy of peanut butter kisses
And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!
