Canadian Cheese Commercial 2002

Commercial to promote Canadian Cheese as broadcast in 2002

Canadian cheeses were almost entirely farm-made until 1864 when an American, Harvey Farrington started buying Canadian milk in commercial quantities necessary for industrial cheese making. The first commercial factory "The Pioneer" was set up in Norwich, Ontario, in 1864.

Following a wheat midge outbreak in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, farmers in the province of Ontario began to convert to dairy farming in large numbers, and cheddar cheese was their main exportable product (before electric refrigeration was invented), even being exported back to the cheese's country of origin, England. In one year, 1867, the year of the Canadian Confederation, 200 cheese factories were established in Ontario alone. In 1881, Édouard-André Barnard created North America's first cheese-making school in Saint-Denis-De La Bouteillerie, Québec. A dairy school (Canada's first) opened in 1892 in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, and in 1901, produced experimental Canadian versions of Camembert and Feta. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were 1,242 cheddar factories in Ontario, and cheddar had become Canada's second-largest export behind timber. Cheddar exports totalled 234,000,000 pounds (106,000,000 kg) in 1904, but by 2012, Canada was a net importer of cheese and a manufactured cheese product "Kraft Dinner" macaroni and cheese had become Canada's most popular grocery product and de facto national dish. James Lewis Kraft grew up on a dairy farm in Ontario, before moving to Chicago. As writer Sarah Champman writes, "Although we cannot wholly lay the decline of cheese craft in Canada at the feet of James Lewis Kraft, it did correspond with the rise of Kraft's processed cheese empire.