What Is “Tasty” Cheese, Anyway?

People who move to Australia must be confounded by their first walk down a supermarket cheese aisle. There are familiar names such as brie, parmesan, mozzarella, feta and camembert … but what’s this “tasty” cheese that outnumbers all of them combined? The term is unique to Australia and New Zealand, and even people who grew up eating Vegemite and tasty cheese sandwiches don’t necessarily know the score.

Will Studd does, of course.

Studd is Australia’s pre-eminent cheese expert, star of the 2025 SBS series Cheese: Searching for a Taste of Place and father to Ellie and Sam Studd.

The story of tasty cheese begins in the early 1900s, he says. Two Swiss men, Fritz Stettler and Walter Gerber, patented the world’s first processed cheese in 1911. Five years on, Canadian American entrepreneur James Kraft developed and patented his own process. The United States entered World War I the very next year, and its hungry soldiers ate a lot of Kraft cheese. Six million pounds, or 2700 tonnes, is the commonly quoted figure. The canned product was lightweight, full of protein and, most importantly, didn’t need refrigeration.

“The Europeans couldn’t believe these guys had something to eat that didn’t need to be kept cold,” Studd tells Broadsheet. “Can you imagine a piece of camembert out there, with no electricity, no way of keeping it cold, in those terrible conditions?”

When peace was declared, processed cheese proliferated across the West, with Kraft and French brand La Vache Qui Rit (“The Laughing Cow”) leading the way. In Melbourne, businessman Fred Walker obtained a local licence to manufacture Kraft processed cheese and began doing so in 1926 with help from Cyril Callister, the same food scientist who’d developed Vegemite for him three years earlier. The iconic blue and white packs were a hit.

“You can understand, in the ’20s, people didn’t have fridges,” Studd says. “Processed cheese offered a really good, tasty snack at home; you could keep it in the larder or wherever you kept your stuff.”

The thing is, the cheese wasn’t known as “processed” back then, before the advent of strict labelling laws. Kraft just marketed its cheese as “cheddar”. That cheesed off competitors who made natural, unprocessed cheddar. They responded with a new label: tasty. Contrary to rumours on Reddit and elsewhere, Studd says it has nothing to do with the strength of the cheese or how long it’s been aged.

“If you make cheddar and you don’t process it, that’s what defines it. I’d love to tell you it’s a GI [ geographical indication ] or it’s got some special meaning behind it, but like so much of what [Aussies] do, it’s just, ‘Nah mate, it’s just tasty,’” he says, laughing. “It’s never been registered. As far as I know, anyone can use the word ‘tasty’.”