A cream cheese shortage has the potential to cause disappointment this holiday season, but food manufacturing company Kraft hopes to bring cheer by reimbursing customers for missed cheesecake.
The upshot is that people who can't bake holiday cheesecakes because they can't find cream cheese can get another tasty treat on Kraft's dime.
Kraft, a Chicago-based company, produces Philadelphia Cream Cheese. According to Bon Appetit, the brand had around 68 percent of the cream cheese market share as of 2020. Companies such as Junior’s Cheesecake use the brand’s cream cheese to make desserts, reports CNN Business.
To pay back cheesecake fans who are sacrificing the dessert at their holiday parties, Kraft has devised a special offer: people can visit a special website set up by Kraft on Dec. 17 and 18 and up to 18,000 of them will be reimbursed $20 for Kraft dessert purchases.
If selected, people can submit receipts to the company in a few weeks to get the reimbursement.
Kraft hopes the offer will keep customers thinking about Philadelphia cream cheese even if it is hard to find.
So, why is it in short supply? Demand for cream cheese went up during the pandemic, said Jenna Thornton, a Kraft Heinz spokeswoman.
“We continue to see elevated and sustained demand across a number of categories where we compete,” Thornton said in a statement, according to The New York Times. “As more people continue to eat breakfast at home and use cream cheese as an ingredient in easy desserts, we expect to see this trend continue.”
“We're investing millions of dollars on Philadelphia cream cheese,” to keep up with demand, Basak Oguz, Philadelphia marketing director, told CNN Business in an e-mail. He said the company has temporarily halted production of a limited number of its products to increase production of its most popular items.
Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that New York City bagel shops were panicking due to a shortage of raw cream cheese from the Philadelphia brand used to make spread.
“I’ve never been out of cream cheese for 30 years,” said Joseph Yemma, the owner of F&H Dairies in Brooklyn, a dairy product distributor for many of the city’s bagel shops.
Phil Pizzano, a sales representative at Fischer Foods, a large food distributor in New York State, said problems that have popped up at every point along the supply chain contributed to the shortage. These include a labor shortage in the manufacturing sector, a lack of truck drivers because of resistance to vaccine mandates and a scarcity of packaging supplies.
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