In the late Fifties Jim Leprino spotted a dietary trend that now seems obvious — Americans love pizza. The young man from Colorado noticed that his friends increasingly chose to hang out at pizza joints, which were proliferating across the country. American troops had returned home from Italy after the Second World War with a taste for the dish and chains spread quickly.
Pizza Hut was founded in Kansas in 1958, two years before the first Domino’s store opened in Michigan. As consumerism soared, American households acquired freezers and filled them with frozen pizzas. About 11 per cent of the US population eats pizza on any given day, according to a 2024 US government report, and in 2009 mozzarella surpassed cheddar as the country’s most popular cheese.
As a son of Italian cheese manufacturers, Leprino was well placed to capitalise on the pizza boom by specialising in the key ingredient, though he started with only $615 in the bank. He began delivering mozzarella to local restaurants and hired an expert Wisconsin cheesemaker, Lester Kielsmeier. Placing an emphasis on efficiency, research and development, Leprino struck deals with leading pizza chains, quickly scaled up his eponymous business and became a mozzarella magnate dubbed the Willy Wonka of Cheese.
A pizza heaped with Leprino mozzarella is put into the Leprino testing oven, 1978
DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
“Pizzerias in this part of the country were buying 5,000 pounds of cheese a week,” Leprino told Forbes magazine. “I thought, this is a good market to go after, so I did.” According to the company, it grew from delivering 200lb of cheese a week to using 6 per cent of the US milk supply to create over 200,000lb of cheese per hour, with more than 5,000 employees and sales in more than 50 countries, including the UK. Supplying Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Domino’s, among other main players, Leprino Foods is the world’s largest producer of mozzarella.
It enjoys a dominant slice of the American pizza cheese market and holds over 50 patents. The company boasted that it cut the typical two-to-four-week cheese processing time to only four hours. In the Eighties it introduced its signature product, Quality-Locked Cheese: flash-frozen shredded or diced cheese. It was a departure from the traditional Italian way. But volume, cost savings and speed are vital to the giant franchises. A crucial early breakthrough came in 1968, Forbes reported, when Leprino began supplying Pizza Hut with time-saving frozen pre-sliced cheese blocks.
Leprino also had a folksy, persuasive personal touch and emphasis on customer satisfaction that helped him to strike long-term deals by tailor-making his products to each company’s needs. Domino’s, with its focus on delivery, wanted cheese that would look oven-fresh even after a lengthy trip to the customer’s home. Pizza Hut used especially hot ovens that required cheese able to withstand high temperatures.
A preservative mist helped to prevent crumbling. Leprino turned whey — usually a discarded by-product — into an ingredient, visiting Japan to meet scientists who were developing whey protein as a dietary supplement and later selling it for uses such as sports nutrition, infant formula and baked goods.
Leprino struck deals with leading pizza chains such as Pizza Hut
The youngest of five children, James Gerald Leprino was born in Denver in 1937 to Mike, who hailed from Potenza, a hundred miles east of Naples, and a fellow Italian immigrant, Susie (née Pergola). Mike moved to Denver aged 16 in 1914 because the mountains reminded him of home and worked as a farmer. He opened a modest corner grocery store in 1950, selling Italian products and making ricotta, mozzarella balls and ravioli under a brand he called Gina Marie. Jim joined the family business in 1956 after finishing high school, two years before competition from chain stores caused it to close.
Leprino built a large corporate headquarters on the same Denver street corner where his parents ran their grocery store. The firm remained a family business controlled by Leprino and his daughters, Terry, a former marketing director of the company, and Gina, who survive him along with his wife, Donna.
Despite his industry dominance the private and media-shy Leprino gave only one in-depth interview, to Forbes in 2017, and was almost never photographed in public. But an internecine legal battle — described, perhaps inevitably, as a meltdown — between Leprino and two of his nieces drew headlines after the death in 2018 of Leprino’s brother, Mike Jr, who held about a quarter of the stock but was ousted from the board in 2014. The nieces sued their uncle over the management of the company’s shares. The courts ruled in Leprino’s favour.
He was reported to have remarked during video testimony: “I got more f***ing money than I know what to do with.” At his death Forbes estimated Leprino’s net worth at $2.1 billion (about £1.5 billion). He was said to own an 11-bedroom mansion in the Denver area and an 8,000 sq ft holiday home in Arizona. A devout Catholic who donated anonymously to charities, Leprino wore a diamond-encrusted watch but carried a battered leather wallet tied with a rubber band, in which he kept a card bearing the company’s four principles: quality, service, price and ethics. “I’ve got everybody keeping one in their pocket,” he told Forbes.
His hands-on approach included operating a forklift truck and attending weekly Monday Melts meetings where he and his executives tested samples. “Your employees have got to know you’re not a phoney. They’ve got to believe in you,” he said.
James Leprino, mozzarella tycoon, was born on November 22, 1937. He died of undisclosed causes on June 19, 2025, aged 87