09/14/2026
Try it. You'll like it!
Kaukauna spreadable cheese traces its roots to a small dairy operation in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, a city between Green Bay and Appleton. The story starts with Peter Fassbender, who emigrated from Prussia in 1856 and eventually bought farmland in Outagamie County, where he built a cheese factory in 1887 using milk from his own cows and neighboring farms.
The factory passed down to his son Hubert Fassbender in 1901, and Hubert grew it into one of the largest creameries and cheese operations in the region. In 1918, he formally founded the South Kaukauna Dairy Company, giving the operation a name and the infrastructure to distribute its products nationwide for the first time.
What made the brand distinctive was Hubert's own invention, a cold pack cheese making process. Instead of using heat, he ground natural cheese down to a fine texture and blended it with whey solids, dry milk, and flavorings like w**e and spices. The result was a cheese that stayed soft and spreadable at room temperature, something that hadn't really existed in that form before. Early advertising for the product, sold under the name Kaukauna Klub, leaned directly into that novelty with the line "it spreads like butter."
The product found a natural home in Wisconsin's supper club culture, where cheese and crackers were a staple appetizer before dinner. Over the decades, Kaukauna spreadable cheese picked up dozens of gold medals and blue ribbons at cheese competitions, including a first place win for its sharp cheddar cold pack at a national cheese contest in 2003, along with the Governor's Sweepstakes Award that same year at the Wisconsin State Fair.
The company eventually became known simply as Kaukauna Cheese and is now part of Bel, the French company behind brands like The Laughing Cow. Even under new corporate ownership, production has stayed rooted in Wisconsin, with operations based just down the road in Little Chute. Kaukauna is now considered the largest manufacturer of cheese balls and cheese logs in the country, a distinction that traces directly back to Hubert Fassbender's original cold pack process.
For a product that started as one family's dairy experiment in a small Fox Valley town, Kaukauna has become one of the more recognizable names on cheese boards nationwide, carrying more than a century of Wisconsin cheesemaking history in every tub.
