4 days ago
James Leprino, ‘Willy Wonka of Cheese' Who Revolutionized Pizza, Dies at 87
James Leprino, who transformed his family's small Italian grocery store in Denver into a mozzarella empire, producing 85 percent of the cheese for pizzas in the United States as the primary supplier for chains like Domino's, Papa Johns and Pizza Hut, died on June 19. He was 87.
Mr. Leprino's death, which has not been widely reported, was announced in a statement from the Leprino Foods Company in Colorado. It did not say where he died or give a cause.
Called 'the Willy Wonka of cheese' by Forbes magazine, Mr. Leprino owned a company that industrialized the production and sale of mozzarella, making him a seminal figure in the piping-hot rise of pizza on the American food pyramid, as well as a billionaire twice over.
In accelerating the exportation of pizza from neighborhood pizzerias to delivery chains and frozen-food aisles, Mr. Leprino's company had to reinvent the process of making mozzarella.
With more than 50 patents for cheese making, Leprino Foods reduced the aging process for mozzarella from 14 days to four hours, created a preservative mist to prevent crumbling and adopted quick-freezing methods that had previously been used for peas.
'The company's production of mozzarella is the envy of the U.S. cheese industry,' The Denver Post Magazine said in 1995. 'The U.S. steel industry found huge productivity gains when it developed technologies to continuously cast long, thin slabs of sheet steel from molten metal. Leprino has perfected the same process with mozzarella.'
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