A patent for process cheese, a research chief and an iced rolling pin.

Kraft Singles are individually wrapped slices of process cheese sold in the United States by Kraft Heinz, the food company headquartered in Chicago and Pittsburgh. The product grew out of the cheese business of James L. Kraft. The New York Times Magazine reported in June 2012 that Kraft, the Canadian-born founder of Kraft Foods, received a patent in 1916 for “process cheese” after a series of experiments at his Chicago boardinghouse. The method heated Cheddar while it was whisked continuously, the article said, and turned cheese into a shippable product with a longer shelf life.

The slice came from his brother. Norman Kraft, who became the company’s head of research, wanted to make things easier for shoppers by cutting the cheese in advance, the Times said. That was harder than it sounded, because process cheese was packed and sealed while still hot and fluid. Around 1935, according to the article, Norman poured liquefied cheese onto a cold stainless-steel table, flattened it with an iced rolling pin and found that he could slice it.

Kraft Heinz tells the same story on its own Kraft Singles history page. The company says Norman, the younger brother of J. L. Kraft, began experimenting with the new method in 1935, and that when he showed his staff the result and they called it “sliced cheese,” he corrected them: these were “cheese slices,” a different thing. The company presents the episode as the start of the product’s history, and its page traces the problem it was meant to solve back to cheese being cut by hand from large wheels and blocks in the early twentieth century.

The gap between the experiment and the shelf was long. The Times quoted Becky Haglund Tousey, then associate director of archives for Kraft Foods, saying that it took another fifteen years for Norman and Kraft’s engineers to perfect the technology and bring the product to market.

De Luxe slices in 1950, an outside patent in 1956 and Kraft Singles in 1965.

Kraft Heinz says that from 1942 to 1945 the company stopped producing cheese for shoppers so that it could concentrate on butter spreads and canned cheese for the armed forces in the Second World War, and that during those years Norman’s method and apparatus received a patent. The company says Norman’s nephew, an engineer, then reworked the refrigeration method around a chill roll, so that the slicing machinery could run continuously. The Times described the same equipment in 2012: liquid, pasteurised cheese ran through a chill roll that looked like a large rolling pin, forming a long ribbon of cheese that was cut into three-inch squares and stacked into a block that could be peeled apart.

The company says it tested the slices in Detroit in 1947 and that sales fell short of expectations, because the stack looked so solid that customers did not realise it was sliced. Its history page repeats a story, which it calls a legend, of a frustrated salesman stamping on a pack and finding that the slices then peeled apart cleanly.

The national launch followed. According to the Times, Kraft De Luxe Process Slices made their debut in 1950, and Modern Packaging magazine wrote that the handicaps of store-sliced cheese, such as uneven thickness, dried-out pieces and curled ends, were overcome. English Wikipedia also gives 1950 as the year of introduction, citing a Life magazine advertisement of September 1950.

The individual wrapper came from outside the company. The Times reported that in August 1956 an Indiana-born engineer, Arnold Nawrocki, received a patent for an “apparatus for producing individually wrapped cheese slices,” noting in it that stacked slices often stuck together and tore when separated. English Wikipedia connects Nawrocki with the Clearfield Cheese Company. Kraft later developed a similar technology, the Times said, and individually wrapped Kraft Singles were introduced in 1965. Kraft Heinz gives the same year, saying that in 1965 Kraft Singles “as we know them today” began to appear in stores, so that a shopper could take one slice and leave the rest of the pack sealed.

Design and documentation.

Butter spreads and packaged cheese share a shelf and a set of design problems. A spread is usually sold in a plastic tub with a printed lid, or as wrapped sticks in a small carton; cheese is sold in vacuum-sealed blocks, in slices, in wedges wrapped in foil, or in a round box that holds several portions. In each case the pack is small, handled every day and stored in a refrigerator, so the brand has to read clearly from the front of a lid, the end of a carton or the face of a block.

That is why so much of the identity in this category sits in a few repeated elements: a name in a set type style, a colour that runs across the whole range, and sometimes a drawn character or symbol that customers can find among many similar packs. Behind those elements, the companies themselves may have changed owners, merged or moved production more than once.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packs and advertising have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Kraft Heinz, a paused split, an Australian rename and a wrapper that opens more easily.

The brand belongs to Kraft Heinz, the company formed when Kraft and Heinz merged in 2015, as Supermarket News recalled in February 2026. In September 2025 Kraft Heinz announced plans to split into two companies, and Al Jazeera and FOX 5 Atlanta both reported on 2 September 2025 that the grocery company, then called North American Grocery Co., would include Kraft Singles alongside Oscar Mayer, Lunchables and Maxwell House. Supermarket News reported on 17 February 2026 that Kraft Heinz was pausing that plan; its chief executive, Steve Cahillane, who joined on 1 January 2026, said many of the company’s challenges were “fixable and within our control.”

The wording on the pack has changed over time. English Wikipedia says the slices were once labelled “Pasteurized Process Cheese Food,” and that after a December 2002 warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration about a recipe change, Kraft adopted the current “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product.” Outside the United States the name has also shifted: Wikipedia, citing news.com.au from May 2017, says that in Australia, where Mondelez kept the rights to the Kraft name after selling its cheese line to Bega Cheese, Bega renamed the slices Dairylea Slices in 2017.

A redesign was reported by CBS Miami, carrying a CNN story, on 24 May 2023. Kraft said in a release that the redesign answered the main complaint from customers, difficulty opening the clear wrapper, with a flap that had more texture and was thicker and sturdier. The outer packaging gained a larger, slightly redesigned logo and what Kraft called “simple and bold typography,” together with a new graphic reading “made with real dairy,” rolled out across the line through the end of 2023.

For a design guide, Kraft Singles shows how a packaging mechanism can become the identity itself: the wrapper around each slice is what the name describes. Compare it with the Kraft Heinz process cheese loaf Velveeta and with its stablemate Philadelphia. For this guide we use Kraft blue, slice orange and wrapper cream with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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