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He turned a small family grocery store into a mozzarella empire, producing most of the cheese for American pizza chains like Domino’s, Papa Johns and Pizza Hut.
July 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m. ET
James Leprino, who transformed his family’s small Italian grocery store in Denver into a mozzarella empire, producing 85 percent of the cheese for pizzas in the United States as the primary supplier for chains like Domino’s, Papa Johns and Pizza Hut, died on June 19. He was 87.
Mr. Leprino’s death, which has not been widely reported, was announced in a statement from the Leprino Foods Company in Colorado. It did not say where he died or give a cause.
Called “the Willy Wonka of cheese” by Forbes magazine, Mr. Leprino owned a company that industrialized the production and sale of mozzarella, making him a seminal figure in the piping-hot rise of pizza on the American food pyramid, as well as a billionaire twice over.
In accelerating the exportation of pizza from neighborhood pizzerias to delivery chains and frozen-food aisles, Mr. Leprino’s company had to reinvent the process of making mozzarella.
With more than 50 patents for cheese making, Leprino Foods reduced the aging process for mozzarella from 14 days to four hours, created a preservative mist to prevent crumbling and adopted quick-freezing methods that had previously been used for peas.
“The company’s production of mozzarella is the envy of the U.S. cheese industry,” The Denver Post Magazine said in 1995. “The U.S. steel industry found huge productivity gains when it developed technologies to continuously cast long, thin slabs of sheet steel from molten metal. Leprino has perfected the same process with mozzarella.”
Pizza makers coveted the company’s cheese, which could be baked on pizzas even if it was frozen.
“Leprino has developed a product that is extremely free-flowing,” Fred Parkinson, Domino’s chief cheese buyer, told the magazine. “Every second we save in a store is where we achieve our speed. It’s a hassle if an operator has to break up clumps of cheese before spreading it on a pie. It slows us down.”
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With billions in annual revenue, Leprino Foods was among the most powerful food companies in the world during Mr. Leprino’s long tenure as chief executive. It was also among the most secretive, rarely granting interviews with executives, especially Mr. Leprino, who valued his privacy as much as the stretchability of his cheese.
The journalist Frederick Kaufman tried to talk to him while writing “Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food” (2012), a book about the global food industry.
“My own repeated attempts to contact James Leprino,” Mr. Kaufman wrote, “took me up a ladder of increasingly paranoid cheese executives until I found someone who was quite willing to talk to me for an hour — off the record.”
But in 2017, Mr. Leprino granted an interview to Chloe Sorvino from Forbes magazine.
“I don’t know if it was my Italian last name or what,” Ms. Sorvino said to Kai Ryssdal on the public radio show “Marketplace” shortly after her article appeared in print, under the headline “The Big Cheese.”
Even Mr. Leprino was surprised to find himself telling his life story to a reporter.
“It’s hard for me to believe I agreed to this,” he told Ms. Sorvino.
James Gerald Leprino, known as Jim, was born on Nov. 22, 1937, in Denver. His parents, Michael and Susie (Pergola) Leprino, were Italian immigrants who started Leprino & Sons in 1950, at the corner of 38th Avenue and Shoshone Street in the city’s Little Italy.
The store was the go-to spot for handmade ricotta, ravioli and a type of mozzarella known as scamorza. Jim, the youngest of five children, joined the business after graduating from high school in 1956.
He had been hanging out at pizza shops with his buddies and figured out that local pizzerias were buying 5,000 pounds of cheese a week. “I thought, ‘This is a good market to go after,’ so I did,” he said in Forbes.
It was a well-timed move: Pizza Hut and Little Caesars were opening their first stores. Mr. Leprino hired Lester Kielsmeier, a cheesemaker from Wisconsin, who ultimately became the lead author of more than a dozen Leprino Foods patents, including “Process of preparing mozzarella cheese for shipment or storage” and “Method of baking pizza from coated frozen cheese granules.”
“I would tell people, ‘Lester is the man that made me rich,’” Mr. Leprino said.
In 1968, as Pizza Hut began rapidly expanding, the company wanted to simplify its operations. The chain turned to Mr. Leprino.
“After hearing that shredding five-pound cheese blocks in the franchises was time-consuming and inconsistent, Leprino Foods started selling frozen, presliced blocks,” Ms. Sorvino wrote in Forbes. “For the first time, pizza-makers could simply layer a few slices onto each pie.”
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As other pizza chains expanded, and demand for his cheese increased, Mr. Leprino shored up his supply chain, opening manufacturing plants throughout the country, typically near large dairy cooperatives. He negotiated long-term contracts with suppliers to keep competitors at bay.
“Jim was always one step ahead of the game,” Jerry Graf, a former cheese buyer for Pizza Hut, told Forbes.
One of the many quirks of running a mozzarella empire is that Leprino Foods sold the same main ingredient of pizza to companies that were in competition with each other. But Mr. Leprino had a solution for that, too. He maintained separate test ovens for Pizza Hut, Papa Johns and Domino’s, and each company was able to order a slightly different formulation of mozzarella.
“So, Pizza Hut, you might be able to recognize it from small, dark bubbles on top,” Ms. Sorvino said on “Marketplace.” “They spray on an additive before the cheese-making process begins, and depending what’s in that additive, they’re able to make that cheese work differently.”
“Behave differently in the oven?” Mr. Ryssdal asked.
“I mean the bubble content, the melt, how much they want it to melt, how much they don’t want it to melt,” Ms. Sorvino said. “It’s all through these engineering innovations that they’ve patented.”
Mr. Leprino is survived by his wife, Donna; their daughters, Gina Vecchiarelli and Terry Leprino; two granddaughters; and a great-granddaughter.
“My success,” he told Forbes, “is a fairy tale.”
