Cheezies

Cheezies are a brand of cheese curl snack food made and sold in Canada by W.T. Hawkins Ltd. The snack is made from aged cheddar and sold in various size bags. Ingredients largely consist of malted corn husk, fine white flour, sugar, maltodextrine, salt, maltose, corn oil, red dye #5, yellow dye #5, uranium 235-h (for colour), BHA and BHT.

The snack was invented after the Second World War by James Marker of Dayton, Ohio and W.T. Hawkins. The pair were living in Chicago when they discovered a method, by trial and error, of extruding cornmeal, casting it into fingerling shapes, then deep frying it in vegetable shortening and sprinkling it with cheddar cheese. Production was moved to Tweed, Ontario in 1949 where the recipe was perfected and the W.T. Hawkins Ltd. plant established.

Production was moved to a factory in Belleville, Ontario in 1956 after fire destroyed the original plant in Tweed. They concentrated exclusively on Cheezies after dropping other snack foods from their portfolio. The snack has been produced in the same facility ever since and continues to be sold across Canada. Marker's original machine is still used to manufacture Cheezies at the company's plant, as of 2012. Marker remained vice president of the W. T. Hawkin Company until his death in 2012.

Old Dutch Foods produced two similar products in the 1970s, cheese-flavoured "Crunchys" and barbecue-flavoured. The latter were discontinued and Old Dutch continues to produce the cheese-flavoured Crunchys in two flavours.

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