American soldiers returned home from Italy with a hankering for a bread topped with tomato sauce and cheese. The bread and tomato sauce weren’t too difficult to reproduce but mozzarella was a hard find in postwar America. Italian immigrants substituted the buffalo milk that the cheese was normally made from with cow’s milk, creating a rubbery white mound that melted perfectly onto bread—perfect for the takeout pizza business that was popping up throughout the Midwest: Pizza Hut (Kansas) in 1958, Little Caesar’s (Michigan) in 1959, Domino’s (Michigan) in 1960.

Baker Cheese, in America’s dairyland and in the eye of that delivery pizza storm, was positioned perfectly for a mozzarella takeover. So the outfit switched gears and met the surge in demand for the pizza-topping cheese by transforming from a cheddar cheese company to a mozz maker.

For these early pizza joints, Baker Cheese would make six-pound loaves or 20-pound blocks of cheese that restaurants would then cut and slice for their pizzas. But then Baker Cheese started getting requests for consumers who were addicted to the hot white melted mass of cheese on their pizzas. They wanted smaller units that they could eat as a snack.

The question was: how? Baker Cheese had to figure out a way to produce and package smaller units of their mozzarella for individual consumption. That wasn’t something they had ever done before.

At the time, the third generation of Baker Cheese had now come into management, but the old guard was still around. “My grandfather, Frank, was playing around with mozzarella” in the plant, Brian said. Frank remained an active participant of Baker Cheese, visiting the plant to watch over the mozzarella-making process.

“My grandfather was an innovator by nature,” Brian said. “He wanted to see if he could seek to do something with the product and packaging for these one-pound packages of mozzarella. Mozzarella was already shredded and cubed, but we didn’t want to compete and invest in that market.”

So Frank started experimenting in the factory with these one pound packages. Normally, mozzarella is molded into a shape from a continuous flow of cheese that is then shaped into a block or square. Frank wondered what would happen if he took this continuous flow of mozzarella and simply chopped them into strips?

“He would cut off strips and hand stretch them and roll them up and cut them into ropes, into little three, four, five inch pieces,” Brian said. “He’d soak them in the salt brine—this highly concentrated salt water—and he realized by doing it this way, cheese would have ‘stringing’ characteristics.”

Et voila: string cheese.

Of course, at the time Frank had no idea he had stumbled upon the future lunch snack of children across America. In fact, children were not the consumer he first tested the stringy cheese logs out on. This being Wisconsin, his idea of market research was simple: Head to the local bar.