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Cheese Prices

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duomo96

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Just wondering what everyone is paying for cheese these days. Im at $2.34lb for Grande block whole mozzarella
 
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These posts are useless without specifying the brand. It’s like saying, “just wondering what everyone is paying for car now a days”.

I could pay anywhere from 1.75 to 3.50 depending on the brand.
 
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I disagree. I do not buy into the brand voodoo on a commodity item like Low Moisture Part-Skim Mozz. As long as it is not “pizza cheese” instead of 100% mozz I am probably fine with it. I know there are vendors out there that are working overtime to sell the brand value and there are pizza stores that swear by it and we have had endless discussions about it here on the TT. I do not not intend to start those debates again as they only run in familiar circles.

We are paying $1.90 this week. If there was another 100% mozz available to me for $1.75 I would buy it.
 
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I paid 1.83 for lmps block from FSA, Roma rep scoffs and says, ‘Our Crown Jewel is only .10 more per lb’. You can call it crown jewel, royal jewel, awesome possum… but it tastes and melts the same as the other lmps I get for a .10 cheaper.
 
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Another thing that would be of interest is the amount the price has gone up/down recently.
 
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Are you guys actually trying different cheeses or just making these statements blindly? I’ve tried 9 LMPS cheeses in the last month and they all ranged from completely TERRIBLE to perfectly USABLE. To say that branding is complete voodoo and 100% mozz is 100% mozz is as ridiculous as saying light beer is light beer, or tomato sauce is tomato sauce.

Do I buy into Grande and other fluff brands? Not at all, as I’ve said in other posts like the ones you’ve mentioned, but come on guys, don’t act like cheese is cheese when it’s not.

I’m not saying that crown jewel is or isn’t any better than whatever cheese FSA sells, hell it could be way worse than FSA, but when you start using the cheese for other items like cold sandwiches, or cooking it on top of baked items or when you pay close attention to all of the other details of the cheese like how it stretches, how it looks when it’s sat for a bit (on a buffet for instance), how it handles being reheated, how it microwaves, so on and so forth, you start to see why some brands are 10 cents more (or even less) than others.

But hey, maybe I’m just concentrating too hard on the cheese, or maybe I simply care too much about my product. Either way, I can without a doubt tell the difference from every cheese I’ve sampled in one way or another. Some are identical, probably because they are simply re branded, but some are so far off that they are the reason why I am typing this now. Cheese ain’t cheese - which is why I’ll say it again - this is useless without saying what brand you’re paying for, or at the very least what plant it came out of.
 
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I can tell the difference too… side by side and when I taste them I will have a favorite. I can’t speak to the issue of sandwiches or other baked items since we stick to pizza and pizza-like items like calzones.

Over the 16 years that I have owned my store we have done several rounds of blind taste tests with customers and staff and I have yet to find a cheese that even gets a majority vote when there are 3 choices in the mix. Even worse, people tasting will not even pick the same cheese they preferred the time before if there is ANYTHING else different. i.e. sauce and toppings have a lot more to do with pizza flavor than cheese does. Therefor we do not shop tomato product for our sauce based on price (except for the same item between vendors) and we do not shop pepperoni, sausage, pesto etc etc on price. We buy the one we like best.

Right now there are 3 different 100% mozz products that we shop price on between Sysco and US Food. We buy the one with the best price. In 16 years I have yet to have a single comment from a customer on the subject. (But I would like to try awesome possum!)
 
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we tested 5 different cheeses some tasted good but browned too much or didn’t have any stretch or to much stretch when melted

you cannot just get the cheapest cheese and call it good. You must test
 
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Last time we tested cheese was 2-3 years ago. Counting whole and part-skim versions available from our two main vendors we must have tasted 7-8 different 100% mozz products and one “pizza cheese”. While there were differences, there was not a single one that I would be unwilling to send out on our product except the “pizza cheese”. After we settled (again) on our preference of lmps versions there were still 4-5 choices. We eliminated the boutique brands because they did not get any more votes than any other choices and they ALWAYS cost more and were left with three that we use according to price. Yes, one browns up a bit more than the other two… but you would have to be studying the issue to notice it. Our customers don’t.
 
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A restaurant depot just opened within reasonable distance from me. I walked in and was amazed at the prices, I paid 1.89 for supremo italian whole milk mozzarella.
Do oven types affect how cheese tastes??

To be tottally honest I think my pizza isn’t as good as an independent conveyor pizza store in my town. Their cheese just has a taste to it mine tastes like nothing unless I put romano (a lot) on it.
I use a deck oven.
 
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I have used the same cheese for 25 years now. Well kinda… We bought a 3% whole mild block from a company called F&A Cheese. Good product it served us well. In 2011 they were bought out by Saputo and kept the same label on the blocks. But a strangely the quality went up. Creamier and yummier. Customers noticed and sales went up. To be honest I thought they didn’t know what they were doing and were sending us the wrong cheese. Then last May the quality took a turn for the worse. Not as creamy, not as tasty. Customers noticed and wanted to know why we changed our cheese. Come to find out the cheese company shut down the plant that we were getting cheese from and was now producing it at a new high tech plant. They assured me it was the same cheese. I assured them that is wasn’t. A few weeks later they flew in some lab coat guy with clipboards and magnifying glasses to inspect our cheese. I produced photos of our old cheese and a description of how it used to be. Mr. lab coat guy said get me 4 weeks and I’ll have your cheese back the way it was. He was correct 4 weeks later our cheese was back to normal. Every once in a while I have to buy some cheese at Restaurant Depot and I always feel that our customers notice it. We even have a couple or Yelp reviews the mention that they got a different cheese once when they ordered. So for us its the same cheese every pizza every day. I order extra just in case and I have our distributors cell phone number just in case we run low on the weekend. I have come to the point where I will close before I’ll send out sup par cheese.

Oh yea back to the subject $1.86 lb Cheese market crashed 10% today
 
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You are absolutely correct noreason. You are the only person who tries different cheeses and cares about their pizza. I’ve staked my entire livelihood for myself and my family on wild guesses.

I was going for the ‘just answer the thread topic’ and was unaware I would have to defend my cheese picking practices but you’ll just have to take my word for it, if the cheese was worth an extra dime, I would pay it. To think that multiple vendors aren’t choosing from the same manufacturer and re branding it as their own is almost as asinine an idea as believing a guy that makes pizza for a living can’t tell the nuances between one cheese and another over the course of their 90 hour work week.

And I paid 1.78 today which is down a nickle from last week, and next week will probably be back to 1.83 or so.
 
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durbancic said:
Walter, just wondering what item # you are referring to here. Is it 200956?
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Yes that is it - whole milk low moisture loaves. I have been using it for years and as far as non browning, taste, it is the best for a real NY pie. Plus the great melting goes a long way. I top by eye but someone recently asked how much cheese I use per pie so I weighed it. For an 18" pie - 10 oz. I know I am pretty accurate because we get 10-11 pies per loaf. Walter
 
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pizzanow said:
You are absolutely correct noreason. You are the only person who tries different cheeses and cares about their pizza. I’ve staked my entire livelihood for myself and my family on wild guesses.

I was going for the ‘just answer the thread topic’ and was unaware I would have to defend my cheese picking practices but you’ll just have to take my word for it, if the cheese was worth an extra dime, I would pay it. To think that multiple vendors aren’t choosing from the same manufacturer and re branding it as their own is almost as asinine an idea as believing a guy that makes pizza for a living can’t tell the nuances between one cheese and another over the course of their 90 hour work week.

And I paid 1.78 today which is down a nickle from last week, and next week will probably be back to 1.83 or so.
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Relax, I said in my previous post that cheeses are re branded. I’m not questioning yours, or anyone else’s ability to choose a quality cheese. We all work hard and care a lot about what we do. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.

My only point was, and I’ll say it a third time, was this: Saying that you pay X.xx for LMPS cheese is pretty vague due to the fact that you are leaving out a major part of the equation. Can you honestly say that if I were to tell you I was paying 1.42 for LMPS cheese that it would mean anything to anyone but myself? Now what if I told you I was paying 1.42 for Grande? That’s when it starts to get interesting and starts to become useful information to others who are buying the same product. Even that can be somewhat useless due to the fact that some people will be buying said product from a different distributors in different parts of the country, or they might be buying in quantities that allow a price break with multi-thousand pound purchases a week where the other guy is just trying to meet the minimum with just cheese alone.

I just feel that these threads are more about who’s paying the least amount when they should be more of a comparison of product x to product x so people can question their salesman when you find out that the guy up the road is paying 45 cents per pound less than you for the exact same product from the exact same distributor. Or, maybe “Hmmm, I’ll have to try and sample that cheese if it’s working well for him AND is 75 cents cheaper than what I’m paying for mine”.

Anyhow, that’s just my thought on it. Once again, I mean no disrespect to anyone, nor did I try to challenge anyone.
 
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