Background
James Lewis Kraft was born on November 11, 1874 in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of George Franklin Krafft, a farmer, and Minerva Alice Tripp Krafft.
James Lewis Kraft was born on November 11, 1874 in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of George Franklin Krafft, a farmer, and Minerva Alice Tripp Krafft.
Kraft was educated in the local schools and became a retail clerk in Fort Erie before moving to the United States in 1903.
Kraft worked as a janitor while attending a Buffalo, New York, business college; in 1904 he moved to Chicago, where he resided for the rest of his life.
He became a naturalized American citizen in 1911. Upon settling in Chicago, Kraft invested his modest savings in a horse and wagon and started a cheese delivery service. He had $65 in operating capital. Purchasing cheese from wholesalers, he sold and delivered it to local food stores.
In his first year of operation Kraft lost $3, 000 and his horse, but he persevered and began to prosper in the next few years. He was joined by two of his brothers, and in 1909 he formed J. L. Kraft Brothers and Company.
When Kraft entered the cheese business, traditional methods of production and distribution were limiting the industry's growth. Cheese marketed in the form of large wheels presented the customer with a product that varied in quality and taste, spoiled easily, and had to be purchased as a wedge cut from the wheel. Sellers continually had to trim off the dried edges of earlier cuttings and discard them as waste, and in some areas spoilage forced the suspension of sales altogether during the summer months. After years of experimentation, Kraft patented in 1916 a method of grinding natural cheese, blending it, and pasteurizing it. The cheese thus processed could be packaged and sold without waste, marketed in more convenient containers, and preserved for longer periods of time in any climate. He began packing cheddar cheese in four-ounce cans in 1916 and sold large amounts of this product to the American armed forces during World War I.
By 1922 Kraft had been granted several more patents relating to the processing of cheese. He was not the only inventor at work in that field, but the earliest disputes about patent rights were either resolved in his favor or ended by the 1921 agreement to share certain rights with the rival Phenix Cheese Company. Kraft's growing success, however, encouraged imitators, against whom he brought a succession of patent infringement suits in the next decade. By the time the essential patents had expired in 1938, the Kraft company had grown enormously. It was incorporated in 1917 with a capital of $150, 000 and gross sales of $2 million; within six years sales reached $22 million and the company had expanded its operations into a number of American cities and Canada. Kraft merged with the Phenix Cheese Company in 1928, and within three years Kraft-Phenix had plants in thirty states and several foreign countries, employed 10, 000 people, and was selling a million pounds of cheese each day. Per capita consumption of cheese in America increased by 50 percent between 1918 and 1945, due in large part to Kraft's efforts. Under his leadership the enterprise expanded to include several other food products. In 1928 it entered the salad dressing field through acquisition and new product development, and his company was an early manufacturer of oleomargarine.
As an employer Kraft tried to retain personal contacts with his workers, and even made rings set with semiprecious stones (his hobby) as awards for deserving employees until his labor force became too large for such gestures. He retired as a director of the holding company in 1948 and as chairman of the board of Kraft Foods in 1951, when he was succeeded by his brother John.
Kraft developed a process for pasteurizing cheese so that it would resist spoiling and could be shipped long distances. He was a pioneer in radio advertising, sponsoring the Kraft Music Hall. In 1931 Kraft-Phenix was absorbed by a New York-based holding company called National Dairy Products Corporation, now known as Kraftco. Kraft served as president of his subsidiary firm and renamed it the Kraft Foods Company. In 1952 he received the Gutenberg Award of the Chicago Bible Society.
Raised in a Mennonite household, Kraft joined the North Shore Baptist Church when he settled in Chicago and was an active layman for the rest of his life.
Superintendent of his church's Sunday school for more than thirty years, he was a member and chairman of its board of deacons, a president of the International Training School for Sunday School Teachers, and a trustee of the Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.
In 1909 Kraft married Pauline Elizabeth Platt of Chicago; they had one daughter.
