NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – Junior’s is hoping to avoid a “cheesecake catastrophe” after an ongoing cream cheese shortage forced it to close production at its baking facility for several days over the past week.
Alan Rosen, the owner of Junior’s, told 1010 WINS on Thursday that the cream cheese shortage—already impacting bagel shops across the city—is particularly difficult for the iconic Brooklyn-based cheesecake company.
“You can make a bagel without cream cheese,” Rosen said. “But cheesecake, especially around holiday time, cannot be made with anything but cream cheese. It’s about 85% of what we put in the recipe.”
Rosen said the company’s mail-order business doubles this time of year and that it does about 50% of its sales in November and December.
“So it really is a cheesecake time for us, and we’re hoping to avoid a cheesecake catastrophe,” he said.
Junior’s had to close production at hits Burlington, New Jersey, bakery on Thursday as it waited to get cream cheese for Friday. Production also closed at the factory last Friday, as well as on Saturday, when the company sent a truck out at 5 a.m. to get a haul of Philadelphia cream cheese.
“We have used Philadelphia cream cheese since 1950,” Rosen said. “It was Breakstone's at the time, and then this iteration of it is exactly the same. And our ingredients have not changed one ounce in 71 years, so we are begging and pleading for our supplies.”
Cream cheese makers tell Rosen that the shortage has been caused by supply issues resulting from a shortage of labor during the pandemic.
“This has never happened to us in our 71-year history with regards to any ingredient—ever,” Rosen said.
Despite the challenges, he said, “We’re going to continue to bake our way through this crisis.”
Even though cream cheese has been hard to come by, Rosen said all of the company’s retailers are supplied and all of its restaurants have the cakes they need for now.
“There is no shortage in finished cheesecake,” he said. “Where the rub is going to be is next week, last minute orders on mail order of certain flavors. We probably will run out of some things because we lost a production day today.”
“But our employees are wonderful, and they’re going to come in on Sunday, and we’re going to try to make up for it then,” he added. “So hopefully there will be no shortages anywhere.”
New York’s bagel businesses have been grappling with the same cream cheese crisis. In a New York Times report over the weekend, owners or workers at about 20 shops across the city said they were rushing to find enough cream cheese to keep business going. They said they’d noticed issues with orders for a few weeks.
A spokesperson for Kraft Heinz, which owns Philadelphia cream cheese, told the Times that the company was seeing more demand for its products and had been shipping out more product than in the previous year to meet that.
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