Standards of Identity

There is a place in the Code of Federal Regulations where the United States government writes down what cheddar is. Not what it should taste like — what it must contain, in percentages, before you are allowed to sell it under that word.

It is 21 CFR Part 133, and once you have read a few sections of it you cannot unsee what it does.

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.

The shape of the thing

A standard of identity is a recipe with the force of law. It fixes the name to a composition. If your product meets the composition you may use the name; if it does not, you may not, and you must call it something else.

For cheese the numbers are almost always the same two:

Milkfat, expressed as a percentage of the solids — not of the cheese. This trips people up constantly. A cheese that is 39% water and “50% fat” is not half fat by weight; it is half fat of what is left when you drive the water off.
Moisture, expressed as a percentage by weight of the whole cheese.

Plus, where it matters, a minimum age.

Cheddar (21 CFR 133.113): “The minimum milkfat content is 50 percent by weight of the solids and the maximum moisture content is 39 percent by weight.” And: “If the dairy ingredients used are not pasteurized, the cheese is cured at a temperature of not less than 35 °F for at least 60 days.”

That last sentence is the whole raw-milk exception, sitting inside the cheddar standard rather than in some separate raw-milk statute.

⭐ Two numbers decide the name, and that is why “low-fat cheddar” is not cheddar

Because the standard is a floor and a ceiling, the composition is the identity. Take fat out of a cheddar and at some point it stops being cheddar in law — which is why the supermarket versions are labelled with careful circumlocutions rather than the plain word.

This is also the honest answer to a question I used to find annoying: why does my homemade cheddar not taste like cheddar? Partly technique, but partly that “cheddar” as a legal object is a very wide box. Anything from 50% fat in dry matter upward, anything up to 39% moisture, any age at all past the minimum — a mild block and a three-year clothbound are the same regulated product.

🔴 Writing a standard of identity for a place-name is how you make it generic

This is the finding that connects this page to protected names, and I think it is the single most useful thing in the wing.

The United States has published standards of identity for a long list of European place-names, with no geography in them at all:

Gruyere (133.149) — 45% milkfat in solids, ≤39% moisture, at least 90 days, small holes or eyes. Switzerland is not mentioned.
Parmesan (133.165) — headed, in the regulation itself, “Parmesan cheese, reggiano cheese”. Cured not less than 10 months, ≤32% moisture, ≥32% milkfat in solids. Emilia is not mentioned, and the word reggiano is printed as a plain synonym.
And on through asiago, romano, edam, gouda, muenster, provolone, and the rest.

Then in 2023 the Fourth Circuit held that “gruyere” is generic in the United States, and among the evidence it relied on was — precisely — “the FDA standard of identity for ‘Gruyere cheese’ is evidence that the term ‘GRUYERE’ is generic” (Interprofession du Gruyère v. U.S. Dairy Export Council, 61 F.4th 407 (4th Cir. 2023)).

⭐⭐ The regulation was the cause, and the ruling was the receipt. Since 1977 American shoppers had been shown a word that the law defined as a recipe rather than a place, and by 2023 the court found that this is what they understood it to mean. Nobody had to argue Gruyère out of Switzerland; publishing the composition did it over forty-six years.

⚠ I want to be careful not to make this sound like a conspiracy. Standards of identity exist for a plainly good reason — they stop a product labelled “cheddar” from being starch and oil, and that was a real problem when they were written. The genericising effect looks more like a side effect than a plan. But it is a side effect with an enormous commercial value attached to it, and both sides of the Atlantic understand that perfectly well.

⭐ “American cheese” is not a cheese, it is a defined blend of four

My favourite piece of Part 133. Pasteurized process cheese (21 CFR 133.169) is made by comminuting and mixing one or more cheeses with heat and emulsifying agents — heated “not less than 30 seconds at a temperature of not less than 150 °F”, emulsifiers capped at 3% by weight.

The naming rule is normally mechanical: single variety gives “Pasteurized process cheddar cheese”, a blend lists the varieties in order of predominance. Except for one carve-out: a mixture of cheddar, washed curd, colby or granular cheese may be called “Pasteurized process American cheese.”

So “American cheese” is a legal term of art meaning a melted mixture of those four. It is not a cheese with an American origin story; it is a permission to stop listing the ingredients. Which, given how the rest of Part 133 treats European place-names, has a certain symmetry to it.

⚠ Note the ladder that runs downward from there, because the words are chosen precisely and the differences are real: process cheese → process cheese food (more moisture, may contain dairy ingredients that are not cheese) → process cheese spread (more still, and stabilisers). Each rung holds less cheese than the one above it, and each has its own standard. The label is telling you exactly where on the ladder you are, if you know to read it — which is the labeling page.

What it means for a home cheesemaker

Nothing at the bench, and something the moment you sell.

Unsold, the standards are simply a reference — a useful one, because they encode what the trade considers the outer limits of a variety, and comparing your own numbers against them is informative. When I finally started weighing wheels before and after aging, the standards were how I knew whether my clothbound had gone somewhere sensible or somewhere strange.

Sold, they become a constraint on what you may call it, and that is a real trap for a small maker. A soft, high-moisture wheel made by a cheddaring method is not legally cheddar if it comes in over 39% moisture, however honestly you arrived at it. The safe answer for a small producer is almost always to name the cheese yourself — a made-up name carries no compositional obligation, and a great many of the best American cheeses are sold under invented names for exactly this reason.

Sources

21 CFR Part 133 (cheeses and related cheese products), especially §133.113 (cheddar), §133.149 (gruyere), §133.165 (parmesan and reggiano), §133.169 (pasteurized process cheese).
Interprofession du Gruyère v. U.S. Dairy Export Council, 61 F.4th 407 (4th Cir. 2023).