A cheddar named after the general store.

Cracker Barrel is an American brand of cheddar and other natural cheeses, sold chilled in blocks, slices and snack formats. Since 2021 it has belonged to the French dairy group Lactalis. The brand’s website names Lactalis Heritage Dairy, Inc. as the owner of the Cracker Barrel trademark, and the copyright line at the foot of its pages reads Lactalis Heritage Dairy.

The brand dates its own start to 1954. Its website says that “Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese was introduced in 1954 by Kraft,” describing a brand born from a love of quality cheese and a passion for cheddar-making, and the brand marked what it called its 70th anniversary in 2024. We give 1954 as the company’s own date. The Kraft link itself is documented: when Kraft Heinz announced the sale of its natural cheese business in November 2021, Cracker Barrel was among the brands whose global intellectual property rights it said were changing hands.

The name, the company says, comes from the 19th-century general store, where customers gathered around “cracker barrels” full of soda crackers to talk. The website says the general-store cracker barrels may be a thing of the past, but that the togetherness they fostered still inspires the brand, and it says the cheese “was designed to fit perfectly on a cracker.” That story is the brand’s own account of its name, and it is the one the company now tells on its “Our Story” page.

The name is also used by others. The brand’s website states that Cracker Barrel cheese is “not associated or affiliated with Cracker Barrel Old Country Store” or with CBOCS Properties, Inc., the restaurant and shop chain’s trademark company.

One sale, two owners of one name.

The ownership change came through a larger sale. On 29 November 2021, the Kraft Heinz Company announced from Chicago that it had completed the sale of its natural, grated, cultured and specialty cheese businesses in the United States to an affiliate of Groupe Lactalis, together with its grated cheese business in Canada and its cheese businesses outside the United States and Canada. The announcement said the divestiture included Kraft Heinz’s global intellectual property rights to several brands, among them Cracker Barrel, Breakstone’s, Knudsen, Athenos, Polly-O and Hoffman’s.

The sale divided the name. Kraft Heinz said it would keep its Kraft, Velveeta and Cracker Barrel macaroni and cheese businesses worldwide, along with Kraft Singles, Velveeta processed cheese and Cheez Whiz in the United States and Canada, and its cream cheese business, including Philadelphia. It also said it would grant Lactalis perpetual licences to use the Kraft and Velveeta names on certain cheese products. The Cracker Barrel cheese website reflects that split in its legal line: it calls Cracker Barrel a registered trademark of Lactalis Heritage Dairy, and Cracker Barrel Macaroni & Cheese a registered trademark owned by Kraft Foods.

The new owner set up a division for the brands. Food Dive reported on 30 May 2024 that the brands Lactalis acquired — the Kraft Natural Cheese namesake, Cracker Barrel, Breakstone’s cottage cheese and Knudsen sour cream and cheese — led to the creation of the Lactalis Heritage Dairy division. The trade publication said Lactalis USA had taken its time over changes to the product mix, spending months studying how shoppers saw and used the brands before it brought new products to market, and it quoted Ken Padgett, marketing director for Kraft Natural Cheese, on that approach.

Lactalis is a family-owned group. English Wikipedia describes Groupe Lactalis as owned by the Besnier family and based in Laval, in the Mayenne department of western France; it says André Besnier started a small cheesemaking business in 1933, that the company launched its Président camembert in 1968, and that it was called Besnier S.A. until 1999.

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.

A wrapper, a starter culture and a cheese board.

Cracker Barrel’s identity is carried mainly by its pack. The brand’s website says its cheese is aged and graded several times during cheesemaking, and that only cheese that passes is wrapped in the brand’s foil packaging, which it says protects the cheese from light oxidation and moisture changes. The same page has a section headed “The many looks of Cracker Barrel,” which says trends have come and gone over six decades while its cheddar has stayed in style.

The company also makes a claim about continuity in the cheese itself. It says it has used the same proprietary heirloom starter cultures for more than half a century; we give that as the company’s statement. Its range now runs across blocks, slices, the “Cracker Cuts” format, cubes, bites, and sticks and bars, by its own product listing.

New flavours have followed the change of owner. Food Dive reported that in January 2024 Cracker Barrel debuted Artisan Flavors cheeses, a Truffle Cheddar and a Dill Havarti, designed for charcuterie boards at a party or as a late-night snack. The brand’s own releases describe a marketing run built around entertaining: summer 2024 wine and cheese pairings with the sommelier André Hueston Mack, and a 70th-anniversary holiday cheese board with the Bravo television personality Craig Conover in October 2024, when the brand director, Amanda Vaal, was quoted on the anniversary. In February 2025 the brand said it had sent a fleet of AI-powered delivery robots around New Orleans with Anthony “Spice” Adams, handing out cheese sticks to football fans.

For a design guide, Cracker Barrel shows how a name, a foil wrapper and a story about the general store can carry a cheese through a change of owner, even when one product bearing the same name stays with the old one. Compare Président, the Lactalis camembert label, and Kraft Mac & Cheese, the Kraft Heinz macaroni line that kept the Kraft name. For this guide we use barrel brown, cheddar gold, foil grey and cracker cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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