The New York Times Magazine looks at the invention of one of my wife’s very favourite things: the Kraft Single.
The cheese single’s finishing touch came from outside Kraft. In August 1956, an Indiana-born engineer named Arnold Nawrocki shocked the processed-cheese world with a patent for an “apparatus for producing individually wrapped cheese slices.” Nawrocki noted that for products like Kraft De Luxe and its imitators, the “cheese slices often stick together, and a consumer has considerable difficulty in trying to separate the individual slices without tearing them.” His machine showed an elegant method for wrapping “a slicelike slab of cheese in a transparent, pliant wrapper.” Kraft later developed a similar technology, and individually wrapped Kraft Singles were introduced in 1965.