When you purchase cheese from Carlino’s, you may be asking yourself a series of questions. Why does their cheese taste so good? Where do they get their cheeses from? Why do the supermarkets’ and competitors’ cheeses taste inferior? This is because, unlike our competitors, we have chosen to stick to our roots and refrain from cryovacking our cheeses. Cryovacking is a method where the cheeses are wrapped in a thick plastic bag and vacuumed sealed by machines. This process is used by other retailers to extend the shelf life of the cheese. Unfortunately for the consumer this has a negative effect on how the cheese tastes.

When cheese arrives at Carlino’s, it arrives in whole wheel form. We, at Carlino’s, consider ourselves to be dinosaur artisans because of the way we handle our cheese. Cheeses here are wire cut and hand wrapped in store every day, in accordance to customer demand, and we are one of the few places to still do so. Cheese is a beautiful, rare, living thing. Hand wrapping in a thin plastic allows the cheese to continue breathing, in contrast to being encased in a multilayered plastic film. The cryovacked cheese is depleted of all its air only allowing the cheese to breathe in the thick plastic, producing a plasticized cheese (now you know where that inferior taste comes from). We continue to practice tradition every day because cheeses, like us, are what they eat, and our cheeses do not want to eat plastic.

Carlino’s cheese is “Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah staying alive” and fresh because of the way it has been handled and packaged. So next time you pick up a wedge of cheese (suffocated by a thick layer of vacuumed sealed plastic), think about how much more alive and flavorful it could be. We have been hand wrapping our cheeses for the past 35 years and we do not plan on breaking this tradition.