Melrose Park-based Caputo Cheese earns a gold medal in world cheese competition

The white-coated judges sniff, taste and cast a discriminating eye over some 3,300 cheeses annually — and one of the very best, they’ve decided, comes from Melrose Park.

A Caputo Cheese fresh mozzarella took first place in the 2024 World Championship Cheese Contest, held in Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this month.

The Caputo winner, a nodini — Italian for “small knots” — won the award, beating out other mozzarella cheeses from elsewhere in the United States, Canada and Japan.

“I learned from some of the greats. We studied the process of making this product. We’ve more or less stuck to our traditions of the past 30 years to continue to make a consistent and very rich and creamy product,” said Natale Caputo, president of Caputo Cheese, which started in 1978 on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Caputo described the nodini variety as the company’s “finest fresh mozzarella,” adding “it goes through a slight extra stretch and it’s tied into a knot” by hand.

Every week, Caputo’s makes about 120,000 pounds of the creamy white cheese. The company also makes Parmesan, Asiago and Romano cheeses.

Caputo cheeses are sold domestically and internationally, including in South Korea, Japan and Costa Rica. The cheese is sold mostly to food distributors and manufacturers and restaurant chains, although anyone wanting to taste the award-winning nodini can pick some up at Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets, with locations in Naperville, Norridge and Mt. Prospect, among other locations. Angelo Caputo is Natale Caputo’s first cousin.

Traditionally, fresh mozzarella is made from the milk of the black water buffalo, but the cheese — as in the Caputo variety — can also be made from cow’s milk, known as “fior di latte.”

The competition named winners in more than 100 other cheese categories. The overall world champion was a Hornbacher, an Alpine cheese from Switzerland.

This year, entries came from 25 countries and 32 states, according to event organizers. Judges look at a cheese’s “flavor, body and texture, salt, color, finish, packaging and other appropriate attributes.”