Spray Cheese Origins: Betty Lou... Who?
You’ll often hear that spray cheese in a can was invented by Nabisco in 1966, when they released “Snack Mate.” That’s the version cited in modern roundups and food trivia sites alike.
But while digging through the archives for Chronoodle, I stumbled across some older history: a 1963 vintage ad for Betty Lou, a division of Granny Goose Foods, proudly introducing a canned sprayable cheese spread that looks… suspiciously familiar.
The Evidence
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📜 This 1963 vintage ad promotes a “New Cheese Idea!” from Betty Lou: a cheese spread in a pressurized can.
📰 A 1963 article from the Long Beach Press-Telegram written by Press-Telegram food editor Mildred K. Flanary describes Betty Lou Foods’ new "tantalizin'" "flo-easy" cheese product. (side note: love the term tantalizin') Available in four flavors:
- Swiss-'N Bleu
- Cream 'O' Swiss
- tillamook (not capitalized)
- and of course... American
The company itself is now a faint memory, but there’s still a LocalWiki entry for Betty Lou Foods that ties them to spray cheese canning innovation, years before Nabisco entered the scene.
🧀 Meanwhile, modern articles routinely cite 1965/1966’s “Snack Mate” from Nabisco as the invention of spray-cheese-in-a-can without a single mention of Betty Lou.
So Who Really Did It First?
It’s hard to say whether Betty Lou Foods invented the *technology*, but they clearly commercialized spray cheese before Nabisco. So why don’t we hear about them?
The same reason we miss a lot of early innovators: they were smaller, scrappier, and didn’t leave behind a giant marketing footprint. Nabisco had reach. Betty Lou had spray-cheese-in-a-can… but not much of a legacy.
Here's to you, Betty Lou!
