Sweet! Upstate NY festival smashes record for world’s largest cheesecake

An Upstate New York festival is officially home to the world’s largest cheesecake. Again.

Kraft Heinz unveiled a 15,008-pound cheesecake Saturday at the Cream Cheese Festival in Lowville, N.Y. Guinness World Records adjudicator Michael Empric confirmed the sweet treat’s size, according to Spectrum News, smashing the previous record by more than 5,000 pounds.

“It is fantastic,” Kraft Heinz Lowville interim plant manager Christina Pomerville said. “The fact that it’s over 15,000 will hopefully make it very difficult for anyone to take the title away from us again.”

The supersized cheesecake brings the record back to Lowville, located about 80 miles north of Syracuse. Kraft previously held the Guinness world record with a 6,900-pound cheesecake at the Cream Cheese Festival in 2013, but a Russian company set a new record in 2017 with a 9,300-pound cheesecake that was 9 feet, 2 inches in diameter.

Saturday’s record-breaking dessert features more than 13,000 pounds of cheesecake filling (made with Philadelphia Cream Cheese from Kraft’s Lowville plant) plus 870 pounds of graham cracker crumbs, 300 pounds of sugar and more than 100 pounds of butter. It also measured more than 11 feet in diameter.

To celebrate, Lt. Col. Adam Keller, commander of the 6-6 Air Cavalry Squadron at Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division, used a sword to cut slices of cheesecake for festival attendees who witnessed the feat. Guinness rules dictate the cheesecake must be edible and served on the day of the record attempt; remaining slices were donated to the Lowville Food Pantry and Watertown Urban Mission, according to WWTI.

Philadelphia cream cheese was invented in the small Jefferson County town of Philadelphia, N.Y., located near Fort Drum military base and about 30 miles north of Lowville.

Some people claim Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the true birthplace of the popular bagel spread but experts say the soft cheese actually originated in 1872 when a dairy farmer named William Lawrence experimented with increasing the cream content in his cheese recipe in the Orange County town of Chester. It soon became known as “Philadelphia” cream cheese and more than 100 years later, Philadelphia-brand cream cheese is now a Kraft Foods Group brand produced at the nation’s largest cream cheese plant, Kraft Heinz in Lowville.

To celebrate its biggest claim to fame, the Lewis County town of Lowville holds an annual Cream Cheese Festival. Next year will mark the free event’s 20th anniversary.