Leprino Foods is a company you've almost certainly never heard of, but whose product you've almost certainly consumed. It makes a billion pounds of cheese each year and controls as much as 85 percent of the pizza cheese market as a supplier to Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s.
Chloe Sorvino of Forbes magazine’s billionaires team visited the Leprino Foods test kitchen in Denver and James Leprino, the "Willy Wonka of cheese." She talked with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about how this pizza cheese empire came to be. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
