Launching Spread - our new dream cheese come true

Sorosh Tavakoli
The Stockeld Dreamery Blog
3 min readJun 8, 2022

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As you probably know, we’ve been obsessing with this cheese making for more than 3 years now. We love cheese but we believe using milk from animals to make it is both wasteful and destructive. We are convinced there’s a better way, even though it’s bloody hard.

2.5 years ago we got into a room to dream about what the world’s most ambitious cream cheese could look like.

We said we would know that we got it right if we would get restaurants and cafes to switch from their beloved dairy cream cheese to our product. If bakers could continue to use the same recipes, just swapping out the cheese. If we can show that a plant-based sandwich can be so much more creative than just adding a smashed avocado. If our product would find new and innovative ways to be used in dips, sauces, frostings, pizzas, burgers and more. If a switch our way, would later make it hard to go back.

Simply put, we had to create a new, but same, cream cheese experience. Our product had to be easy to understand, easy to use and easy to like.

Today we couldn’t be more proud to unveil to you our latest dream come true; the brand new Stockeld Spread. Made from fermented chickpeas and lentils, it’s nutritionally on par with its dairy counterparts with 5.1% protein and 20% fat. It delivers amazing bagels, thrives on cake frostings and gives creaminess to any sweet or savory dish out there, just like the cream cheese we are all used to. All this, with about 70% lower carbon footprint compared to dairy-based cream cheese (final GHG emission analysis still pending).

I’m here.

This week, you can find Spread on the limited edition Stockeld Pizza at Mellqvist on Rörstrandsgatan in Stockholm. It has also found its way to ChouChou’s Stockeld Cricket Burger made by activist chef and our friend Gustav “Jävligt Gott” Johansson.

Two ways of putting Spread to work: Carrot Cake and Jam Toast. Recipes by David Frenkiel.

The launch of this product has not been a given though. At some point the product’s hero ingredient was not approved by the EU. Later on we had two different prototypes, both amazing but in different ways, but none of them lived up to what we wanted to achieve. Our food scientists made it clear to us that the color could not be improved and this was it. More than a years’ work had potentially hit a dead end. Things got dark.

But together we pushed ourselves, challenged what we thought was impossible and a few months later we had cracked a new path for the product which eventually got us here!

The feedback from chefs, friends, consumers and peers in the industry started to lean towards “WOW!”. And when we got Emmanuel Faber, former CEO of Danone, to call out “the best cream cheese I’ve ever tasted” we felt we were getting very close. We then conducted a 130+ consumer side-by-side blind test with various cream cheese products, coming out at the top of our plant based peers. We were ready, at least for a 1.0 launch and to see in real life how well Spread could deliver on our dreams for it!

In the weeks and months to come our production will ramp up and expect us to announce new venues where you can enjoy Spread. In late summer we will gradually make our way into retail stores as well, still only limited to Sweden. We will also launch versions of Spread with new exciting flavors and we are well underway with Spread 2.0. The world’s most ambitious cheese refuses to settle. The journey is the destination. Stay tuned!

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Sorosh Tavakoli
The Stockeld Dreamery Blog

Founder & CEO Stockeld Dreamery | Founder of Videoplaza (sold in 2014) | Based in New York.