Everyone's Blaming Pfizer for the Cheese. They Sold It in 1996.

A viral panic says Pfizer secretly makes the enzyme in 90% of your cheese. Pfizer invented it, true. But they cashed out thirty years ago, and the patent died not long after. So who actually owns it now? Follow the trail and it lands somewhere nobody's shouting about: the same Danish foundation that controls the company behind Ozempic.

Earlier this year a claim tore around the internet and a lot of people quietly stopped buying cheese.

The claim: roughly 90% of cheese is set with a genetically engineered enzyme that Pfizer created, and nobody's allowed to know because it isn't on the label. Cue the boycotts, the "Pfizer franken-milk" headlines, the screenshots, the outrage. Big Pharma is in your cheddar and they didn't tell you.

The frustrating thing is that the core fact is true, and the conclusion drawn from it is wrong. Pfizer did invent the enzyme. Pfizer does not make your cheese, profit from your cheese, or have anything to do with your cheese, and hasn't since 1996. The viral version gets the history right and the present completely backwards.

And the real answer to "so who owns it now" is far more interesting than the one everyone's angry about. It just requires following the money instead of stopping at the scary name. So let's follow it.

What Pfizer actually did

In the 1980s, cheese had a supply problem. The enzyme that sets it, chymosin, traditionally came from the stomach of a slaughtered calf, and demand was outgrowing the supply. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, had the biotech to solve it: splice the calf's chymosin gene into a microbe, grow the microbe in a fermentation tank, harvest the enzyme. No calf required.

They patented it in 1984 and branded it Chymax. In 1990 the US FDA approved it, making it the first genetically engineered ingredient ever allowed into the food supply, a story in its own right. For about six years, Pfizer made it and sold it, and it began its takeover of the cheese industry.

That's the part the viral posts get right. Then they stop, roughly thirty years too early.

Pfizer cashed out in 1996

In 1996, Pfizer sold the entire food-enzyme division to a Danish company called Chr. Hansen, and walked away from cheese for good. It was an outright sale of the business unit, not a licence, not a joint venture, a clean exit. Pfizer's name came off the product and never went back on.

The terms were never disclosed, so nobody can tell you what Chr. Hansen paid, and that figure is almost certainly not public. But the structure of the deal is what matters, and it's clear: Pfizer sold the thing. When you sell a business outright, you get paid once, at the sale, and then you're out. There's no trailing cut of every block of cheese sold for the next three decades. That isn't how a divestiture works.

There's a small, almost funny detail that's the only trace of Pfizer left in the whole story. Chr. Hansen kept the Chymax brand name, Pfizer's name for the enzyme, on its own product. Their in-house version had been called Chymogen, but the Pfizer-era brand was the known one, so they kept it. So the single remaining link between Pfizer and your cheese is a brand name that a Danish company owns and uses. That's it. The money, the technology, the ownership, all of it left Pfizer in 1996.

And the patent died around 2004

Here's the second nail, and it's the one that ends the "Pfizer profits from this" claim entirely.

Patents last twenty years. The 1984 patent expired around 2004. The moment a patent expires, the invention enters the public domain and anyone can make it, with no payment to the original inventor. So even if Pfizer had somehow kept a licensing tail after 1996, which the outright sale already rules out, that tail would have run dry two decades ago when the patent lapsed.

So the question "does Pfizer still make money from the enzyme in your cheese" has a clean, two-part answer. They sold the business in 1996, so no equity. The patent expired around 2004, so no royalties. Pfizer earned from this for about fourteen years, from approval to sale, and has earned nothing from it for the roughly thirty years since. The company everyone is currently boycotting cheese over has not touched a cent from this enzyme since before most of the people boycotting it could vote.

The panic is yelling at a building Pfizer moved out of in 1996.

So who actually owns it now

This is where it gets worth the walk.

Chr. Hansen made the enzyme for the next twenty-eight years. Then, in January 2024, Chr. Hansen merged with another Danish bioscience giant, Novozymes, to form a single company called Novonesis. If you've never heard of Novonesis, you're not alone, and that's part of the point. It's a roughly four-billion-euro company, eleven thousand staff across forty-five countries, and it quietly makes the microbes and enzymes behind a huge slice of the world's food. Including the chymosin that sets most of its cheese. The brand is still called Chy-Max, the same name that traces all the way back to Pfizer.

Novonesis is the dominant global supplier of this enzyme. There's really only one other player of scale, the Dutch-Swiss group dsm-firmenich, which makes a competing chymosin called Maxiren. Two companies, between them, set most of the planet's cheese. The enzyme that feels like the most artisanal, traditional, farmhouse thing in the world comes from one of the most concentrated supply chains in food.

Who's actually standing there

Novonesis isn't the bottom of the trail. Companies have owners too, and Novonesis has two layers worth seeing.

Underneath, in the ordinary shareholding, it's the same names that sit under almost everything on this site: BlackRock, Vanguard, Norges Bank, the big index funds, holding their usual slices. If you've read the ownership pieces here before, you'll recognise the pattern. Follow nearly any large food or ingredient company up the chain and you arrive at the same handful of global asset managers. Novonesis is no different. They're there.

But here they're not in charge, and that's the wrinkle. Novonesis is controlled by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, a Danish charitable foundation, which through its investment arm holds about a quarter of the shares but controls roughly two-thirds of the votes, through a dual-class structure where its shares carry ten times the votes. So unlike the usual story, where the index funds are the quiet owners of record, here BlackRock and Vanguard own pieces but don't hold the controls. The Foundation does. They're passengers; it's driving.

And here's the name on the Foundation that should ring a bell. The Novo Nordisk Foundation is the same entity that controls Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy. The Novo Group is, formally, three companies under one Foundation: Novo Nordisk (the drugs), Novonesis (the enzymes), and Novo Holdings (the investments). Same parent, same control structure.

Sit with the shape of that, because it's the genuinely strange part, and it's what the viral version missed entirely by stopping at "Pfizer." One Danish foundation sits on top of both the biggest diabetes-and-obesity drug company on earth and the enzyme in most of the world's cheese. Its fortune now rests overwhelmingly on the weight-loss drugs reshaping how the rich world eats, while one of its other arms quietly supplies an ingredient in the everyday food supply. The same owner, at the top of both. Not a conspiracy, there's no link between the cheese and the drugs beyond who owns them, and it's all in plain public filings. It's just that nobody chasing the Pfizer headline ever looked past it.

And Pfizer? Not on this chart anywhere. No shares, no royalties, no brand it still owns, no seat. It sold the business in 1996 and the patent died around 2004. The company the internet is boycotting cheese over isn't in the ownership of this at all. The actual owners are a layer of index funds you've met before, and above them a foundation most cheese-eaters have never heard of.

This is exactly why "who makes it" and "who owns it" are different questions. Everyone asked who made the enzyme, got "Pfizer," and stopped. The more useful question, the one this whole site keeps returning to, is who owns the thing now, and who owns them. Follow that and you don't end up at a drug company that left the room in 1996. You end up where you usually do, at the global funds, and this time at a foundation sitting on top of both the cheese and the cure.

What this doesn't mean

A few things, to be clear, because the point here is accuracy, not a new panic to replace the old one.

None of this makes the enzyme unsafe. It's the same chymosin molecule as the calf version, it's been in the food supply since 1990 with no demonstrated harm, and the ownership of the company that makes it has no bearing on whether it's safe to eat. A foundation owning it is not sinister in itself; the Novo Nordisk Foundation funds a great deal of legitimate science.

And none of this is hidden. The Foundation's control of Novonesis is published, the merger history is on the record, the patent dates are public, the shareholders are listed. There's no cover-up here. The only thing that got obscured was the truth, and it got obscured by a viral claim that was louder than it was correct.

What it means is narrower and, I think, more useful than outrage. When a scary name attaches to your food, the instinct is to stop at the name. But names are the least durable part of any supply chain. Pfizer's been gone from this for thirty years and the panic never noticed. The thing worth knowing was never "which famous company is involved." It was "who actually owns this now, and who owns them." That answer is usually quieter, harder to find, and far more telling than the headline. In this case it was a foundation most cheese-eaters have never heard of, holding both ends of a story about how we eat.

The enzyme in your cheese has a long history. Pfizer is the part everyone remembers and the part that stopped mattering in 1996. The part that matters now doesn't make a catchy headline, which is probably why you hadn't heard it until now.

Related reading from OFT:

• What Is Non-Animal Rennet, and Is It in Your Cheese? — the enzyme itself, and how to read it on a label
• New Zealand Is Debating Gene Tech. It's Been in the Cheese for 25 Years. — how this enzyme became the first GM ingredient in the food supply
• Mainland Organic Cheese: Is Non-Animal Rennet Legit? — where all this lands on one supermarket block