Cream cheese
soft, mild-tasting cheese with a high fat content
Cream cheese is a soft, usually mild-tasting fresh cheese made from milk and cream. Cream cheese is not naturally matured and is meant to be consumed fresh, so it differs from other soft cheeses, such as Brie and Neufchâtel. It is more comparable in taste, texture, and production methods to Boursin and mascarpone. Stabilizers, such as carob bean gum and carrageenan, are often added in industrial production. It can also come in several flavors.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines cream cheese as containing at least 33% milk fat with a moisture content of not more than 55%, and a pH range of 4.4 to 4.9. Similarly, under Canadian Food and Drug Regulations, cream cheese must contain at least 30% milk fat and a maximum of 55% moisture. In other countries, it is defined differently and may need a considerably higher fat content.
Cream cheese originated in the United States in the 1870s.
Origin
Around 1873, William A. Lawrence, a dairyman in Chester, New York, was the first to mass produce an unripened fresh cheese known generically as cream cheese.
The public source identifies “Cream cheese” as soft, mild-tasting cheese with a high fat content. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cream, cheese and soft.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q426337. The Library of Congress control number is sh85033805. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1873.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cream cheese” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.