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When James Leprino’s family grocery store in Denver’s “Little Italy” began to flounder in the 1950s, he proposed a pivot. Chefs would need tons of cheese to fuel Americans’ growing appetite for pizza.
“I thought, ‘This is a good market to go after.’” Leprino told Forbes in 2017. “So I did.”
That bet paid off and his family’s small store grew into the world’s largest supplier of what is arguably the most important ingredient of the American pizza boom: affordable mozzarella. The two biggest chains in the US — Domino’s and Pizza Hut — both top their products with Leprino’s cheese.
The success of the Leprino Foods Company also made Leprino, who died last month aged 87, into what Forbes called “The Willy Wonka of Cheese.”
Leprino, who went by “Jim,” was the youngest of five children born to an Italian immigrant family in Colorado in 1937. His father, Mike, came to America from the southern Italian province of Potenza, and in 1950 opened a small corner grocery store in Denver.
Leprino grew up hand-rolling ricotta and scamorza in the back of his parents’ store. These cheeses had been only a small part of the business, which his father used primarily to sell the produce the family grew on their nearby farm.
Leprino joined the family business directly after high school and took it over two years later in 1958, when his father died. He had to forgo a college education to focus on the business.
Many Americans were just discovering pizza at the time, as demand from second world war veterans who had tasted it while serving in Italy pushed Italian émigrés to open pizzerias across the country.
Leprino gambled on the fact that pizzerias were not just a fad. He pivoted his operation entirely into supplying them. Leprino Foods shifted to mass producing frozen, pre-sliced blocks of mozzarella that chefs could simply lay on top of crusts, saving time and money for early Pizza Hut locations.
This innovation helped him grow the company into what ultimately became the supplier of 85 per cent of America’s pizza cheese.
He experimented with novel production methods and high-tech preservatives that sliced cheesemaking time from up to four weeks to just four hours. His cheese also created the “stretch” characteristic of American slices. These advances yielded more than 50 patents for the company.
The “Mozzarella Magnate” is also credited for popularising whey, a liquid byproduct strained off cheese curds. Leprino began exporting it to Japan in the 1970s as a nutritional supplement, paving the way for its present day ubiquity in the protein powders and shakes that weightlifters use to build muscle, creating a market worth an estimated $5bn to $10bn.
This earned Leprino the rank of the sixth-richest person in the state of Colorado in 2025, with a net worth of $2.1bn.
“I got more fucking money than I know what to do with,” he said during a deposition filmed for a 2022 legal proceeding.
Leprino was famously private. He donated to charity anonymously and was a passionate supporter of medical research. He only ever gave one in-depth interview, with Forbes in 2017.
“It’s hard for me to believe I agreed to this,” he told the magazine. “I really like to keep my privacy.”
For decades there was only one known photograph of Leprino, a 1978 company portrait, until a lawsuit brought by his nieces Nancy and Mary Leprino pushed him to appear in a Denver courtroom in 2022.
His nieces claimed that the cheesemonger had deliberately shut them out of business deals and declared their shares worthless after they inherited a 25 per cent stake in Leprino Foods following the death of their father — Leprino’s brother — in 2018. The jury sided with the billionaire.
He and wife Donna had two daughters, Gina and Terry. He is also survived by two granddaughters and a great-granddaughter. The family are devout Catholics.
“My success is a fairy tale,” Leprino said in 2017.
He said he planned never to retire and he remained chair of the company’s board until he died, working from the Denver headquarters on the same block where his father founded the original grocery store decades earlier.
Taylor Nicole Rogers