In 1903 James L. Kraft started a wholesale door-to-door cheese business in Chicago. Eventually he was joined by his brothers and the J.L. Kraft and Bros. Co. was formed in 1909. In 1915, the company invented pasteurized processed cheese that did not need refrigeration and enabled a longer shelf life than conventional cheese. Propelled by this innovation, the business grew quickly and soon started to expand internationally such as to Canada and later the UK.

By 1924, the company changed its name to Kraft Cheese Company, was publicly listed, and soon thereafter, in May 1926, entered into a joint-venture in Australia, which was named the Kraft Walker Cheese Co. James Kraft’s business partner Down Under was Fred Walker, a seasoned Australian businessman best known for creating Vegemite, a yeast extract-based food spread and an Australian cultural icon. What is lesser known is that Walker already at the young age of 19 went to China and founded Fred Walker & Co. in Hong Kong in 1903 as an import and export business. 

But as Carl Crow rightfully pointed out in his book “400 Million Customers”, China continued to be off-limits for Western cheese producers. Historically, cheese and other dairy products were not staples in traditional Han Chinese diets, largely due to lactose intolerance which over two thirds of the population suffer from. Furthermore, the Western delicacy became a victim of its distinct smell and appearance which was incomprehensible to Chinese consumers. 

As the final nail in the coffin for cheesemakers, Crow explained about the Chinese that, “even if they ate cheese, it would not be a popular food product, because of a very simple and obvious pun on the Chinese name turns it into the name of an article which is certainly unfit for human consumption.” He might have alluded to the fact that in one of cheese’s (many) Chinese translations, the second character of the homophone “zhīshì” (芝士) could be misheard as shǐ (屎), meaning feces. 

In short, during Republican era China, cheese could simply not be marketed and sold to the local population, but was only imported (and eventually locally produced) in small quantities for the Western residents of the main treaty ports like Shanghai, Tianjin or Hankou. We can find plenty of advertisements in English and French-language newspapers and magazines, including for Australian-produced Kraft cheese, which was already available in China as early as 1926. However, no Chinese language adverts for Kraft cheese were published in the local press and one struggles to find any cheese manufacturer who ever targeted the native population with their allegedly foul-smelling product. 

Two notable exceptions are early 1911 print ads for Dutch Vezet cheese and a ca. 1935 out-of-home campaign for “Chateau Cheese” from Canada, both of which of course failed miserably…

The poster was not hastily produced, because we can see that deliberate and thoughtful effort went into creating it: It features the illustration of a stunning Chinese beauty in an en vogue Qipao dress and from the signature to her right we can see that it was designed by China’s most prolific commercial illustrator Hang Zhiying. 

We can also discover that Kraft did not decide to use any of the common translations for “cheese” at the time, but instead claimed its brand “provides all sorts of “rǔsū” (乳酥). 乳(rǔ) means milk, while 酥(sū) is archaic for butter, but in modern times was commonly used in Chinese culture to describe soft, melt-in-the-mouth food with a delicate feel. 

By describing cheese as a "milk-based delicacy," Kraft avoided the foreignness and strong associations of smell and taste that could alienate potential consumers while dodging any potential puns or misunderstandings. This was however the first and only use of “rǔsū”, known to us, referring to cheese and evidently didn’t stick. Nowadays, “rǔsū” is mostly used for shortbread or similar sweet pastries and as good as never is associated with cheese.

Lastly, the poster is topped with the name of Kraft Walker’s distributor in China, Huáchāng (华昌洋行), whose English name was Geddes Trading & Dairy Co. It specialized in importing and producing butter and other dairy products for a Western clientele, and at the time when our poster was produced, had already been in business for over 50 years. Its owner, Charles Geddes, was described by the press as “one of the oldest and most respected foreign residents in China”. Without a doubt, Geddes with its half-a-century long experience in China would have known, that even with such a fancy advertisement and a slick new category name, marketing cheese to the locals was a lost cause.  

One explanation could be that this poster was never intended for consumers. Instead, it might have been produced as a token of appreciation and incentive from Geddes for the staff of its many retail customers. Chinese calendar posters were traditionally gifted to business contacts during Chinese New Year and most grocery stores who sold to Westerners were run by Chinese such as Shanghai’s largest food store Van Shing & Co or the oldest provisioner in the city, Dombey & Sons. Likewise, all of the big 4 department stores, the Wing-On, Sincere, Sun Sun and Dah Sun, were Chinese owned & operated. So most likely this remarkable calendar was just a trade incentive, encouraging Chinese retailers to sell more Kraft products to cheese-obsessed foreigners. 

Another theory, although admittedly far-fetched and without further evidence, could be that the poster ultimately was not produced for China at all: In 1930 Kraft had merged with National Dairy Products Corp, making the combined entity the largest dairy company in the USA and in fact the world.

The business however suffered immensely during the Great Depression, with the stock tanking over 90% from its 1929 peak to its 1933 low. Following this downturn, the share price rebounded, rising about 180% from late 1933 to its peak in 1936. 

But another recession hit the USA in 1937–38 and Kraft may have leveraged global expansion narratives to maintain American investor confidence amid uncertain times. What better way to sell the “China dream” of 400 million customers (the population of China at the time and the apt title to Carl Crow’s book), than by producing an advertising poster that, to Western eyes, appeared exotic—potentially boosting the company's valuation?

Alas, whatever the true purpose of this poster, the dream was short-lived. The Second Sino-Japanese War began in July 1937, and by August, full-scale fighting had erupted in Shanghai. The conflict disrupted supply chains, consumer purchasing power plummeted due to inflation and instability, and access to broader markets became nearly impossible as fighting intensified. Nonetheless, an English-language grocer price list from our collection confirms that Kraft cheese was still available in Shanghai in 1941—albeit at exorbitant prices and only for the remaining Western residents of the cosmopolitan International Settlement. 

In conclusion there is no indication that, besides this one poster from our collection, Kraft cheese was ever advertised in Chinese up to the 1980s, making it one of the rarest oddities in our collection.

Today, 40 years after Kraft re-entered the market, China still has one of the lowest rates of cheese consumption in the world. On average, a Chinese citizen consumes only ~300 grams of cheese annually, which is about 1% of the same amount a Frenchman eats in the same period.

Even neighboring Asian countries like Japan (2.5kg) and South Korea (3.7kg) consume ten times more. Tough cheese.