Easy Cheese
Photo credit: Photo: Fishepat000, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Cheese in an aerosol-style can — squirt it onto a cracker in a squiggle, or straight into your mouth if no one was watching. Shelf-stable, faintly artificial, and weirdly satisfying, Easy Cheese was the ultimate lazy snack.
Nabisco introduced spray cheese in 1965 under the name "Snack Mate," pitched with the tagline "instant cheese for instant parties." It was renamed Easy Cheese in 1984 and today is owned by Mondelēz International. The product is a pasteurized process cheese spread — real dairy, but engineered to be shelf-stable and squeezable.
The can is more clever than it looks. It isn't a true aerosol: inside is a two-chamber design, with the cheese up top and pressurized nitrogen below, separated by a moving plastic piston. Press the nozzle and the gas pushes the piston up, extruding the cheese — but the propellant never actually touches the food, which is why it comes out in a dense ribbon rather than a foamy spray. Over the years it came in flavors from plain American and cheddar to sharp cheddar and bacon, plus discontinued oddities like pizza and shrimp cocktail.
Easy Cheese was a fixture of 90s snacking — the co-star of a stack of Ritz crackers, the topping squirted onto Pringles, the road-trip and lunchbox staple that doubled as a dare. It never pretended to be gourmet, and that was the appeal: a can of cheese you could point and shoot. Decades later it's still on shelves, essentially unchanged.
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