I also talked to Joe Widmer about the samples of brick cheese he was going to send me this morning. Joe asked me if it was okay if he sent them after the holidays because this is their busiest part of the year. I told Joe it was fine with me if the samples were sent after the holidays. Joe told me to remind him about the samples after the holidays.
Norma,
It will be interesting to see how the Widmer brick cheese works out on a Buddy's clone pizza once you are able to get a sample of that cheese. However, I seriously doubt that Buddy's is using a product like the Widmer brick cheese. I have been researching brick cheese and Wisconsin producers of that cheese and I believe that Buddy's is using a major producer of brick cheese, not any of the many small and mom-and-pop brick cheese producers that operate out of Wisconsin.
Originally, Buddy's used Kraft as its supplier of brick cheese. Then, it went with Foremost Farms. Foremost Farms is a giant operator and is organized as a cooperative that embraces many producers of dairy products. You can see this at
http://www.foremostfarms.com/About-Us/Vision-and-Values/History.php. Also, as you can see from the map at
http://www.foremostfarms.com/Commercial/Processing.php, all of the Foremost Farms processing plants are located in Wisconsin. Foremost not only serves the foodservice market sector directly but it also deals with intermediaries that cut, grind/shred and package cheeses for the retail market. An example of such an intermediary is the Deli Source/Wilmont Farms company that was mentioned earlier in this thread as the supplier (along with Widmer) of brick cheese to Central Market stores in Texas. For the quantity of brick cheese that Buddy's must go through, there would be no reason to buy from someone like Wilmont. They would deal with Foremost or a foodservice company that handles the Foremost brick cheese.
As was mentioned previously in the Buddy's thread at Reply 322 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3783.msg136883.html#msg136883, Buddy's showed the Foremost Farms logo in the menu that it was using as of 2009 at
http://www.buddyspizza.com/documents/WebsiteMenu7.2.10.pdf, specifically, at page 4 in the square pizza section of the menu. For some reason, Buddy's omitted reference to Foremost in later menus. However, when you wrote to Buddy's to inquire about the fat in their brick cheese, you were told that there was 9 grams of fat for a 28-gram quantity (Reply 97 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,21559.msg220645/topicseen.html#msg220645). That is the amount of fat shown by Foremost for its brick cheese at
http://www.foremostfarms.com/Commercial/pdfs/Nutritional%20Information/NDS_Brick.pdf.
If Buddy's is no longer using the Foremost brick cheese, I wondered what other large supplier it might be using. I thought that Land O Lakes, also a large cooperative, might offer a brick cheese but I could not find that product listed at the Land O Lakes foodservice website at
http://landolakesfoodservice.com/products/default.aspx?c=86.. However, at one time, Land O Lakes apparently did offer a brick cheese, as noted, for example, at
http://cf.foodfacts.com/NutritionFacts/Mixed-Combination-Cheese/Land-O-Lakes-White-Brick-Cheese-5-lb/70890.
If Kraft is still in the business of selling brick cheese, I could not find that cheese listed at its foodservice website at
http://www.kraftfoodservice.com/products/productinfosearchresults.aspx?catalogtype=3&categoryid=101&searchtext=process%20cheese&pageno=2.
Until better information comes our way, I am assuming that Buddy's is still using the Foremost Farms brick cheese.
Peter
