- [Narrator] It is a global market valued
at over $20 billion.
- It's decadent and it's luxurious.
- [Narrator] from diners and delis
to iconic chains around the world.
- Cheesecake is almost romantic.
It's the product that you have at your engagement
at the dinner afterwards.
It's just a high end experience and it delivers.
- [Narrator] But the multi-billion dollar industry
emerged from a series of accidents, bold gambles,
and ideas no one knew they needed.
Beginning with a simple cheese transformed by a small tweak.
- He tastes it and he goes, "Man,
this is way better than this other stuff I'm making.
- Philadelphia cream cheese.
- [Narrator] And that one change opens the door
to an entirely new kind of dessert.
- Reuben wants to make something that's going to appeal
to the customers of his restaurant.
People love sweets and they love rich pies.
- So he used cream cheese.
- It was something the likes
of which no one in New York had had,
and everyone in New York wanted to try.
- [Narrator] But another baker takes it to new heights.
- Can we still have the bakery?
- That's the plan, Sara Lee.
- [Narrator] By pioneering frozen dessert.
- Sara Lee has created a whole new category
in the American food landscape.
- [Narrator] And putting cheesecake in freezers
across America.
- It changes the dynamic of what people expect
to get from the supermarket.
- [Narrator] While another family risks it all
by betting on dessert as the main attraction.
- You wanna open a restaurant based entirely on cheesecake?
- For all intents and purposes,
a restaurant that's built all around
one specific kind of dessert should not work,
but here we are.
- Everybody loves cheesecake. Come on.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Today,
cheesecake is one of America's top five
most popular desserts alongside chocolate chip cookies,
ice cream, brownies, and apple pie.
But less than a hundred years ago,
it was something very different than what we know today.
- So the idea of a cheesecake actually dates back
all the way to ancient Greece
where people would eat cakes
or pies made with essentially cottage cheese and honey.
- [Narrator] Early cheesecakes were simple, dense,
and barely sweet, made to fuel the body,
not indulge a sweet tooth.
- Then as time progressed, Europeans especially Germans,
would create their own versions of cheesecake
using different cheeses.
- These European style cheesecakes use cheeses
that have a large, what we call a curd.
The curd is sort of the grain of the cheese.
So a ricotta has a large curd.
Cottage cheese has a large curd.
A lot of the European cheesecakes would utilize
these cheeses and they would tend to be less sweet.
- It is light years away from what we now consider
to be cheesecake, simply because
one key ingredient had not yet been created.
- New American cheesecake is built on one ingredient,
and that's cream cheese.
- [Narrator] It is 1872
and on an upstate New York Dairy farm,
William Lawrence is working on a request
for an elite New York cheese shop.
- William Lawrence is a farmer
in rural Orange County, New York,
a little town called Chester.
He marries into a dairy farming family,
but he pretty quickly realizes that
it's not super easy being a dairy farmer,
especially in a time period before pasteurization,
and so he decides he wants to go into cheese making.
- Milk spoils within a day without refrigeration.
And so therefore, turning that milk into cheese,
adding salt, and withdrawing the water
allows that to last for a lot longer.
- [Narrator] While cheeses like Cheddar
and Swiss are popular among most Americans in the 1870s,
a new trend is emerging among the wealthy,
a growing taste for French varieties of cheese.
- By the time we get to the late 19th century,
particularly the lead up to the Gilded Age,
wealthy Americans are traveling more and more to Europe.
They're being exposed to
kind of the wealthy aristocracy in Europe
and they want to emulate it.
And so you start to see a lot of French, fancy, aged cheeses
like brie, like Roquefort, like Camembert, like Neufchâtel.
- Neufchâtel is a soft, slightly crumbly cheese.
It actually originated from the Normandy region
of France in the sixth century,
and it was usually just spread on crackers,
like most soft cheeses were.
- [Narrator] Lawrence often sells
to upscale cheese shops in New York City,
and one of them has asked him
to create a richer, creamier version of Neufchâtel.
- [Sarah] And so he takes the typical process of Neufchâtel
which is made with whole milk,
and he adds heavy cream to the process.
- [Narrator] Classic French cheeses rely on
whole or skim milk, and aging for flavor.
- Heavy cream creates a much more mild tasting cheese.
French cheeses were notoriously stinky
that had a bit more tang or a bit more bite,
and he understood that
by creating this new variation on this cheese,
he might alienate the very people he was creating it for.
- [Narrator] To signal that it's different
from traditional Neufchâtel,
he labels it Neufchâtel and cream cheese,
hoping to spark his customer's curiosity,
but he has no idea that
what he's made is far more than a richer milder Neufchâtel;
it's the start of a multi-billion dollar industry,
the world's first cream cheese.
Right now, he's just hoping
it will sell well at a single cheese shop.
- [Adam] His clients end up selling this creamier iteration
of Neufchâtel cheese at a much higher price point,
and people really feel that this is a much more luxurious,
much creamier product.
Ultimately, the clients end up attracting more customers
than they know how to handle,
and people are clamoring
for Lawrence's Neufchâtel and cream cheese,
the most creamy, mild tasting,
and luxurious spreadable cheese on the market.
- [Narrator] Soon, other cheese shops throughout New York City
are placing orders for Lawrence's creamier Neufchâtel.
- As more cheese shops begin to sell it,
there's a buzz around this cheese that goes even
beyond the elite cheese shops.
Everybody wanted to try it.
- [Narrator] Even as Lawrence works around the clock
to keep up,
getting large orders of delicate cheese
to his customers is a whole other challenge.
- So the Neufchâtel product was kind of in a round,
almost log type product that was generated
and that was just how the product was made.
Think of like a wheel of Camembert.
That's what people were used to at the time,
and then that's how you actually sold it.
- One day, while Lawrence is packaging these
little rounds of Neufchâtel into crates to be shipped,
he realizes that there's all these gaps in a square crate.
- We're wasting so much space.
- And suddenly, the light bulb goes off.
- [Chirag] And shipping was so expensive at that point,
it didn't really make sense to have
a separate shipping container for whatever was left over.
[tense music]
- He says, "Aha, I'm gonna make my cheese
into rectangular bricks.
I can fit more cheese per crate.
I can ship more, and therefore I can sell more."
- [Erin] So I always find it really fascinating when someone
looks at a problem and identifies a solution
that's literally never been thought of before.
You know, and to us it seems so obvious,
but back then it's this revolutionary idea.
- [Adam] This simple variation of turning a soft cheese
from the traditional round
into a rectangular brick will change the way soft cheeses,
and his cheese in particular, is packaged forever.
- [Narrator] But the biggest breakthrough
for Lawrence's cheese will come thanks
to an unlikely source, a complete stranger.
In 1880, the cheese catches the attention
of a cheese broker from New York City.
- Alva Reynolds specialized in selling dairy products,
so he would go around in a cart selling his product.
- These were brokers who were able
to bring these cheeses from their rural markets
to the cities where they could be distributed.
- [Narrator] Convinced Lawrence's cheese
could go far beyond a local curiosity,
Alva Reynolds proposes a partnership.
- I'm not really looking for a partner.
My cheese sells just fine.
- I took the liberty of mocking up an idea.
- Just "cream cheese"?
Why would you call it that?
- He's not seeing what Reynolds is seeing,
which is that this creamy Neufchâtel
is not a Neufchâtel at all.
It's a totally different kind of cheese,
and it should be marketed that way.
- It doesn't sound nearly as...
- French? - Yes.
- Because it's not French.
- [Narrator] Reynolds sees the making
of a distinctly American product.
- So he sees this opportunity not just
to give it a new name, but to really own it.
- [Narrator] Reynolds' vision will ultimately turn
an unusual local cheese into a product that sells
hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
And in time, it will lay the foundation
for one of America's most beloved desserts.
But first, it needs a name.
- You do know we're in New York?
- Of course.
- Then why would we call it Philadelphia?
- [Narrator] It's 1880
and cheese broker Alva Reynolds tries to make a deal
with dairy farmer William Lawrence for his unique product,
a creamier take on French Neufchâtel.
- Reynolds looks at Lawrence and realizes he's created
a whole new category and he goes, "Wait,
we can capitalize on this."
- [Narrator] Reynolds proposes selling the cheese
not as Neufchâtel,
but as a new product with a name of its own.
- The Philadelphia moniker really comes about because
Philadelphia had this kind of aura of quality
and purity in their dairy products
being from Pennsylvania.
- It was known for having
dairy farms, dairy fields, loads of cows.
- [Sarah] We're not used to thinking of it as pastoral
with all these dairy farms surrounding it.
But in the 1870s, that's what it was,
and New York City, in the 1860s especially,
there were a bunch of swill milk scandals, right,
where urban dairies were selling adulterated milk.
Some of it was infected with tuberculosis.
There's still this idea that New York dairy
is is not as good
as maybe this higher reputation dairy
coming out of Pennsylvania.
- Isn't that a bit dishonest?
- We're not saying it's from Philadelphia.
We're just giving it a name.
- A branded name.
- In the late 1800s, branding products,
grocery products, was very unusual.
Typically in food, if you manufactured food products
or ingredients, you did it locally,
and you didn't sell things with a brand,
you just took them to the general store
and they were sold out of barrels or what have you.
- Philadelphia cream cheese.
- [Adam] In the late 19th century, if you made soap,
it was just called soap.
If you made cheese, you made Gouda, you made Stilton,
you made Edam, you made cheddar,
but you didn't give it a brand name.
- That was bold, that was forward thinking,
and giving it the name Philadelphia,
when it was made in upstate New York, even more bold.
[laughs]
But it was a great idea
and it gave it this sort of elevated, you know,
sort of urban feel like it was fancier.
- [Narrator] Lawrence agrees to partner with Reynolds,
and in 1880,
their cream cheese hits stores
throughout the greater New York region.
- When Philadelphia cream cheese makes its debut,
it's an instant hit,
and the brand name only helps the word spread faster.
- [Paul] Cream cheese is spreadable
in a particularly smooth way
that appealed to consumers along with a taste
that was mild but distinctive.
- [Narrator] And it isn't long before larger distributors
take notice.
In 1903, a thriving cheese company from New York purchases
Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
- By the time he passes away in 1911,
William Lawrence is a very wealthy man.
- [Narrator] Philadelphia instantly becomes a bestseller
and quickly expands its distribution
throughout the east coast.
- Phoenix is actually producing
2,000 boxes of Philadelphia cream cheese every single day.
- [Narrator] As the market is flooded with rivals,
the biggest name in American cheese,
Kraft, acquires Philadelphia.
- Eventually, Phoenix is bought by Kraft
and Philadelphia Cream Cheese becomes a Kraft product.
- At this point in time,
Kraft is kind of the cheese company of America.
They've invented American cheese,
the first shelf stable cheese,
and they were an important source of cheese
for the US military.
- [Narrator] With Kraft's resources
and a patented pasteurization process,
Philadelphia Cream Cheese expands nationwide,
becoming a staple in millions of American refrigerators.
- Well before a fascination with bagels in the 1950s,
most people were enjoying cream cheese on toast
or on crackers,
some even putting it
in the hollowed out rib of a piece of celery.
But cream cheese was still
to have its most powerful, beautiful,
and delectable incarnation.
- [Narrator] In 1929,
a restaurateur is on the verge of a discovery.
- Arnold Rubin ran a delicatessen
and later restaurant called Reuben's in Manhattan
in the early 20th century.
It really was this sort of place
where ordinary people and kind of the rich
and famous could sort of hobnob together.
- Broadway stars and movie stars, high powered businessmen,
rubbed elbows over his unique
and delicious dishes,
many of which were inspired by his European heritage.
- [Sarah] Very classic Jewish foods.
- [Adam] Duck and red cabbage, matza ball soup, apple pancakes,
and of course, arguably his most famous creation,
the Reuben sandwich: grilled rye, corned beef,
Swiss, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing.
- [Brooke] Reuben was a foodie.
He also loved to host dinner parties
at his Manhattan apartment,
so if his friends are gonna bring him a recipe
that he feels like hits nail on the head,
he's gonna borrow it.
- All right, I brought something a little different tonight.
It's a recipe from my cousin in Brooklyn.
It's cheese pie.
- Cheese pie?
- Trust me, you're gonna love it.
Okay, has fresh ricotta.
- One of the guests brought a cheese pie for dessert.
- [Erin] Savory cheese pies were big in Europe,
but not big in America.
- It's not very sweet, but it's interesting.
[tense music]
- [Narrator] Inspired by the savory cheese pie,
Reuben begins work on his next big idea.
- [Adam] Much in the same way that Reuben would repurpose
sort of hardy peasant dishes from his homeland.
Reuben would prove that reinvention and reinterpretation
culinarily was his strongest talent.
- [Narrator] While the idea of a cheese pie
for dessert would be foreign to most Americans,
Reuben believes a more decadent version could be a hit.
- Reuben wanted to create this dish with a different cheese
that would be a more velvety, smooth, creamy texture.
So he ditched the cottage cheese and he used cream cheese.
- [Erin] Reuben wants to make something that's going to appeal
to the customers of his restaurant.
People love sweets and they love rich pies.
- [Narrator] And when he adds generous amounts of sugar,
it's sweet enough to make it unmistakably a dessert.
- Because it was one, cohesive style of cake
as opposed to a filling put into a pie crust,
you have a cheesecake, not a cheese pie.
- [Narrator] He calls his creation Reuben's cheese cake.
- It was something the likes of which
no one in New York had had,
and everyone in New York wanted to try.
- [Narrator] By the late 1930s, it becomes the talk of New York.
- Suddenly, other restaurants wanted in
on Reuben's cheese cake,
famously New York icon Lindy's Restaurant,
which was a Broadway hotspot since the 1920s.
They added their own version of cheesecake
to the menu, and then a decade later,
Junior's debuted their version of cheesecake.
- [Narrator] Reuben's cream cheese based creation
would soon become known as New York cheesecake,
but the whole country is about to claim it.
- [Adam] Executives at Kraft Foods,
who owned the Philadelphia Cream Cheese brand,
suddenly saw the rise in popularity
of this cream cheese-based New York cheesecake,
and they saw an opportunity there.
- [Narrator] What comes next will take a regional dessert
and turn it into a $21 billion American obsession.
- [Narrator] In the 1930s,
Kraft spots a dessert on the rise in New York,
one powered by the company's own top selling product.
- Philadelphia Cream Cheese isn't the only cream cheese,
but their name is synonymous with cream cheese.
- [Narrator] To capitalize
on the success of New York cheesecake,
Kraft launches a national advertising campaign,
which includes Philadelphia cake,
a cheesecake recipe using
five and a half blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese.
- Cream cheese alone, that block of cream cheese,
you know, you might love the way the box opens
and you peel back the foil wrapper,
but the likelihood of you eating
an entire block of cream cheese is probably slim to none.
You're gonna put it on a bagel,
you're gonna do something else with it.
But when you create a recipe that calls
for several blocks of cream cheese
and you're Philadelphia Cream Cheese,
you're creating a totally different world, right?
Oh, you're giving somebody an excuse
to buy three blocks as opposed to one.
- [Narrator] While the name Philadelphia cake
doesn't take hold, the dessert itself does.
- In the '40s and the '50s, Kraft's expanding distribution
spread the recipe and its popularity even further,
eventually even putting a recipe
right on the package itself.
- Suddenly, cheesecake is not just the specialty dessert
that you get in a New York City restaurant,
it's something that you can make at home.
[pensive music]
- Alright, moment of truth.
- [Narrator] In a Chicago kitchen,
a bakery owner has been experimenting
with a cheesecake recipe of his own.
- In 1935, Charles Lubin
and his brother-in-law pooled all of their money
and came up with $700.
They then borrowed an additional $800,
and with that 1,500,
they bought three independent bakeries in Chicago,
which they renamed Community Bake Shops.
- [Narrator] But recently,
his brother-in-law has left the business
completely in Lubin's hands, and to keep it growing,
he's looking to add something new to the menu.
- You think I finally got it?
I was going for something lighter, a little smoother.
- Lubin loves to test out his recipes at home,
and he often uses his daughter as a taste tester.
- It's so good.
Can we sell it at the bakery?
- That's the plan, and I felt maybe I'd name it
after my best helper.
- Who's that?
- You, Sara Lee.
- [Narrator] With his recipe set, Lubin adds cheesecake
to his bakery menu and it soon becomes a bestseller.
- The cheesecakes themselves are so popular
that in 1949, Lubin changes the name of the bakeries
from Community Bake Shops to the Kitchens of Sara Lee.
- [Narrator] The cheesecakes sell for 79 cents each,
and in just one year, the kitchens of Sara Lee
gross $400,000 on cheesecakes alone.
[intense music]
[phone ringing]
- [Lubin] Hello?
- One day, a buyer from Texas visits Chicago,
samples the cheesecake, loves it, wants it,
and says, "Can you ship this to me in Texas?"
- Texas? Unfortunately, we don't ship.
You know, the cake's fresh.
- Lubin explains that these cheesecakes are made
with no preservatives,
and these fresh dairy ingredients won't stay fresh
long enough to make the journey to Texas.
- There are really only three ways
that a person could have access to this type of item:
to purchase it in a restaurant,
to purchase it directly from a bakery
or to make it at home themselves.
- And there were no real insulated packages
that could really retain the temperature
and the freshness of these baked goods,
especially ones that were dairy heavy like cheesecake
and extremely prone to spoilage.
- Believe me, if I could find a way to ship these,
I'd be a very rich man.
- Suddenly, Lubin realizes
that he's leaving money on the table.
- [Narrator] This will set Lubin on a path
that will give rise to an iconic global juggernaut,
generating $17 billion in annual sales
and changing the way Americans eat dessert at home.
But first, he'll have to figure out
how to do the impossible.
[dramatic music]
300 miles east, a housewife is experimenting
with a new recipe,
one she hopes will impress her husband's boss.
- Hope you saved room for dessert.
- Is that a cheesecake?
- I found a recipe in the paper last week,
tinkered around with it a little bit.
- [Jason] So Evelyn Overton is a woman
who finds a cheesecake recipe in a Detroit newspaper
in the 1940s, and she uses that recipe as the basis
for her own personal cheesecake recipe.
- I've had cheesecake at Lindy's in New York,
and this is better.
You think you can make a bunch of them?
I'd pay you for it.
- She literally hears the same thing
over and over again, which is,
"Your cheesecake is so good.
You should do this professionally."
- [Narrator] For Evelyn, it's an idea
that will one day power the creation
of an international restaurant giant,
generating over $3 billion a year
and rewriting the rules of cheesecake and restaurants.
But for now, it's just a farfetched dream.
- [Narrator] It's 1952
and Charles Lubin's cheesecakes are a hit,
but he's limited to selling them
only in his Chicago bakeries.
To grow his business, he knows he needs to find a way
to ship his fresh desserts.
- Bakery products have a shelf life of about a day.
You go to your local bakery, you buy that bread.
Man, is that bread incredible out of the bag that day,
but by the next day, not so much,
and then by day three, it's in the garbage.
- How are we gonna monetize this
by getting this product everywhere?
Well, we've got freezing.
Of course, that makes perfect sense. We're gonna freeze it.
- [Narrator] But the frozen food industry
is still in its infancy,
and the concept of frozen baked goods doesn't yet exist.
- Freezing was almost exclusively reserved
for vegetables and for meats.
- Some frozen foods are much more accessible than others.
When you get multiple ingredient desserts like pies,
like cheesecakes, things where you have different densities
of foods that are gonna react differently to freezing,
it becomes much more complicated.
- [Lloyd] Freezing of dairy and baked goods is
incredibly difficult, and this is largely because
of the water content of these products
and the fat content of these products.
So it looked great when you put it in the freezer,
it would've tasted great.
Now you put it in the freezer,
the water goes from a liquid to a solid
and breaks apart the entire structure of that product,
just like your pipes burst
when the water freezes in those pipes.
- When the cheesecake would thaw, you would deal with
moisture weeping, sogginess,
or even separation within the cheese itself,
creating something fairly gross.
- So that had to start a concept of, okay,
how do we understand freezing
and how do we get a product that is frozen
and then thawed out and still has the same characteristics
as it did when we initially made the product?
- [Narrator] Lubin takes his inspiration
from frozen vegetables,
one of the only successful frozen food items on the market.
- [Adam] In the 1920s, a man by the name of Clarence Birdseye
created a revolutionary method
for preserving foods, called flash freezing.
He famously was ice fishing,
and when he pulled the fish out of the water,
it froze solid almost instantly,
and he was astonished that when he reheated it later on,
it was as fresh-tasting as though he had just caught it.
After several rounds of experimentation,
he realized that a quick freezing process
under pressure created a fresher product
and a product that would reheat or reconstitute better.
- [Narrator] But a dense dairy cake is different.
In order to flash freeze it immediately from the oven,
Lubin would need a pan he can bake, freeze, and ship it in.
- [Chirag] Basically, he needs a disposable baking tin,
but that didn't really exist yet.
But what did exist was tinfoil.
- [Narrator] Lubin begins experimenting
with creating foil baking pans
for flash freezing his cheesecakes,
- Lubin designed foil baking pans,
essentially creating a disposable pan
that he could bake the cheesecake in
and ship it to the customers.
- [Narrator] For the first time in history,
cheesecakes are now available beyond restaurants,
the bakery, or fresh out of the oven.
- [Beth] They can sit in a freezer for six months,
then land on somebody's counter
and be like you bought it from the bakery
the next day, a total revolution,
not only on the freezing side,
but on the fact that they were packaging something
that was like, just perfect
from a freezing technology standpoint.
- [Narrator] By the mid 1950s,
Sara Lee expands their frozen line
and their all butter pound cake becomes a smash hit,
second only to their cheesecake,
- And suddenly, Sara Lee has created a whole new category
in the American food landscape, frozen pastries.
- Think about the frozen section at that time, right?
What's in the freezer section?
Well, there's ice cream,
there's just starting to be vegetables,
thank you, Birdseye,
and then all of a sudden you see a cheesecake,
and it's packaged in a proper bakery box?
That must have just been kind of wild to see, right?
- It was an incredible step forward in terms of convenience,
and Sara Lee was the pioneer of it.
- [Narrator] In 1956, Lubin sells the Kitchens of Sara Lee
to Consolidated Foods for $2.8 million,
more than 30 million today.
- Consolidated Foods at this time was a major wholesaler
and distributor, and they were able to provide Sara Lee
with the freezers and the refrigeration in mobile transit
as much as in distribution, holding,
and point of sale, that they required to get their cheesecake
and all of their confections from coast to coast.
- [Narrator] By the late 1960s,
Sara Lee's logo is famous in freezer isles,
and their jingle in American homes,
inspiring millions to eat more cheesecake.
- "Everybody doesn't like something..."
♪ But nobody doesn't like Sara Lee ♪
- [Narrator] As Sara Lee's cheesecakes sweep the nation,
Evelyn Overton takes notice,
because long before cheesecakes went national,
she'd been making her own.
Two decades earlier, Evelyn had turned her passion
for baking into a small cheesecake business
with more orders than she could handle
as a busy mother and housewife.
- Everyone loved her cheesecakes.
The demand was high.
- [Jason] So she got into the business of making cheesecakes
as gifts, and eventually,
she does a pretty swift business of this.
But at a certain point, she retires from making cheesecakes
because she wants to take care of her kids.
- [Narrator] She doesn't know it yet,
but her abandoned bakery dream will soon
become a multi-billion dollar restaurant empire.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] It's 1971,
and housewife Evelyn Overton has been inspired
to get back into baking.
- What's the occasion?
You haven't made your cheesecake in years.
- Visit from my son.
And trying to lure you into coming home more often.
- Have you ever thought of going back into business?
Cheesecakes have never been more popular.
- [Sarah] David Overton grew up not particularly wealthy,
but his mom became very locally famous for her desserts,
particularly her cheesecake.
- [Adam] Since he was a child,
David wanted to be a rock and roll star,
but he found the music business tough.
So he sort of hedged his bets
and attended law school in California,
but after a year, he realized it wasn't for him.
- [Narrator] But David suddenly sees an opportunity
for a lucrative family business.
- All the restaurants in LA
want cheesecakes on their dessert menus.
- The thing that's happening in LA versus Detroit
is it's kind of on the cutting edge of food in many ways
at this time.
You have a real innovative hub
of food happening,
and if you think about where sushi got its start,
you think about the health food movement.
You think about all these different things converging,
it's all happening in LA in the 1970s.
- David comes up with this idea to open a bakery in LA
that just solely serves
his mom's cheesecakes to restaurants.
- But the really important thing to note is
that her and her husband live in Detroit, Michigan.
- Ultimately, David convinces his parents to move to LA
and open a bakery there,
and in 1972, with the very last of their savings,
they make the move.
- Their plan is simple,
it's to sell cheesecakes wholesale to local restaurants.
With the bustling restaurants scene in LA,
they're hoping it'll be a much less risky proposition
than opening a retail bakery.
- [Narrator] They call their business
The Cheesecake Factory Bakery.
- David, come have a look at this.
I decided to get a little creative.
What do you think, too much?
- At this time, you might have seen
some fruit toppings on cheesecakes here and there,
but for the most part,
cheesecake was considered so rich on its own
that it was just served plain.
- Too much?
What else can you put on them?
- Evelyn starts experimenting, adding crazy things
to her cheesecakes,
and she's really creating this level of decadence
that didn't really exist before.
- [Narrator] But for all her innovation,
the restaurant industry remains unconvinced.
- Two dozen.
What flavor?
All plain?
We have strawberry, chocolate, caramel?
Plain it is.
- The Overtons' family business did have one major problem.
They were making way too many varieties of cheesecake.
- All people want is plain.
- Most restaurants would order one or maybe two varieties.
The idea of having a dozen or more varieties
of cheesecake was both taking money,
time, and resources out of the bakery itself,
and there was no market for it.
- But she knows that this can sell.
- We can't keep on making all these crazy flavors
if the restaurants aren't buying them.
- Eventually, David says, "Wait a minute."
- Let's open up our own restaurant.
- We don't know how to run a restaurant.
What would we even serve?
- Who cares? The draw will be this.
- Here's the idea, Cheesecake Factory Restaurant.
- You wanna open a restaurant based entirely on cheesecake?
- He thinks her cheesecakes are so good
that they can actually open up a restaurant
built around them.
Now, this goes against what a lot of people think
is good business.
30 flavors of cheesecake?
- Why not?
- [Brooke] For all intents and purposes,
a dessert only restaurant should not work.
- [Narrator] At her wholesale bakery,
Evelyn Overton's growing stable
of innovative cheesecake flavors aren't selling
with local restaurant owners.
So her son, David, suggests a radical move:
open their own restaurant built around them.
- No more selling to every restaurant in the city.
And guess what? We're gonna put 30 cheesecakes on the menu.
- She's trying to do something bigger and different
and really use the cheesecake as a canvas
for all these different and new flavors.
- [Narrator] Despite having no restaurant experience,
the Overtons go all in on their son's business idea.
They call it The Cheesecake Factory.
- In 1978, David Overton joins the family business
in a big, bold way, opening the first ever
Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Beverly Hills,
serving up all varieties of his mom's cheesecake,
along with small thing,s like salads
and appetizers and burgers,
things that he could cook himself.
- It's really one of the first theme restaurants,
if you think about it,
and certainly one of the only restaurants that's teasing
with the dessert in the name.
- It was really exciting to be confronted
with so many options for cheesecake,
most of which I'm sure not only had people never had,
but had probably never heard of.
- People hadn't really seen anything quite like this
in the restaurant space, but he does it.
And guess what? People line up for the place.
It happens to just work.
- [Vallery] It gives your customers a reason to come back.
They're gonna wanna come back
and try some of those other flavors.
So it was just a really brilliant marketing strategy
and it set them apart from other restaurants.
- [Narrator] As the money pours in,
the Overtons open a second restaurant in Marina del Rey,
and by 1998, they have 25 stores nationwide.
As the chain expands, so does their menu.
- This is at a time where cuisine mixing on a menu
is not really something that restaurants did
outside of maybe a diner that would have like
tacos and meatloaf.
So the idea of adding everything under the sun
to a cheesecake restaurant's menu
was an absolutely novel idea.
- The Cheesecake Factory menu is arguably
a restaurant icon in its own right.
It's like, you know it's intense when cheesecakes alone
take up three or four pages.
- [Narrator] The Cheesecake Factory now has
over 200 locations across the United States.
Sales last year reached revenues of $3.7 billion.
Their menu includes 200 items
and more than 30 varieties of cheesecake.
- Look, you can get a very simple cheesecake at any bakery.
You can make a cheesecake at home,
but you go to the restaurant
and cheesecake becomes an elevated experience.
It really established this sort of strange
and yet wonderful scenario,
and it's not quite like anything else you've ever seen.
- [Narrator] Of course, before there could be
a restaurant juggernaut based on cheesecake,
Sara Lee had to make it a national icon.
- The Sara Lee brand
and its products became so iconic
that in 1985, Consolidated Foods changed its name
to the Sara Lee Corporation.
- [Narrator] Today, Sara Lee operates in over 180 countries
with nearly 155,000 employees worldwide
and surpassed $17 billion in retail sales
in just one year alone.
Frozen cheesecakes are still the company's best sellers,
but Sara Lee could never have existed
without its essential ingredient.
In 2024, Philadelphia Cream Cheese
reported roughly $800 million in sales,
and the company is valued at over 6 billion.
- [Paul] The innovation of
the Philadelphia Cream Cheese Company
is that a primary product was itself made into a brand.
As far as I know, no one had made a cheese into a brand
before the 1880s.
- [Narrator] To this day, Philadelphia still controls
68% of the cream cheese market in the United States.
- I think cheesecake today is still a luxury product.
Who doesn't look forward to going out
to eat somewhere having a really nice steak,
and then you gotta finish it off with a cheesecake.
There isn't a top notch restaurant
that doesn't have cheesecake on the menu,
so it's so ubiquitous for Americans today.
- I love a cheesecake that is caramelized at the top,
so it has those beautiful little light brown spots,
maybe the color of this dress.
- As anyone who loves cheesecake knows,
it can be very dangerous to have
an entire cheesecake in your house.
- Cheesecake is, was, and will always be
something beloved, something respected,
and something inexorably tied
to the culinary identity of this nation.