Clearly there are differing views of this as some of the posts above indicate. In my experience, if you are changing cheese types altogether it is certainly something to be careful about. But, as I learned nearly 40 years ago in my first pizza job (OK 36 years ago this August) pizza SAUCE is the most important element in pizza taste (and pizza cheese is the most important element in pizza COST). We have changed our sauce recipe twice in 15 years, both times after extensive taste testing. We were changing for taste not price.
We have switched cheeses many many times in 15 years. We often change once a month or more and certainly change several times each year but we are pretty much always changing between the same type of cheese… i.e. low moisture, part skim mozz. Right now we go back and forth between three different LMPS Mozz cheese from two different suppliers based on price. We have never had even one comment on the subject. I very much doubt our customers notice, especially those that order our typical pizzas which come with 5-7 toppings.
When we have done side by side A-B taste tests on similar cheeses (plain cheese pizza, everything the same except the cheese) we have never found a cheese that garnered a strong majority preference (and that includes Grande). When there have been three or more cheeses in the same test, we have never even had one cheese get a simple majority. We did however, get a solid majority in favor of mozz over cheddar blends when we taste tested that.
With the current six week running drop in cheese prices, I am looking forward to cheese prices coming down well below where they have been pretty much all this year in next month and that is a welcome thing for sure. I expect my price to go below $2.20 by mid June and hopefully the trend will continue. The supplier that gets there first gets the business!
