I once spent Christmas eating fondue in a quaint little restaurant in the Swiss Alps after a horse-drawn sleigh ride through snowy St. Moritz. (Um, actual, not-so-humble brag, I know.) The best cheese fondue at the grocery store—which you’ll typically find in a little rectangular box in your grocery store’s nice cheese section—may not quite channel that experience, but it’s at least as good as the fondue you had at some suburban Melting Pot in the ‘90s. And that’s plenty good.
What were we looking for in the best fondue cheese? We wanted it to be very smooth and melty (some are clumpier than others). We wanted the bitterness of emmentaler cheese and a little bit of stinky funk, but not too much funk. And, of course, we wanted that signature kirschwasser bite that hits you on the sides of your tongue and makes fondue taste like fondue rather than regular ol’ melted cheese. This is the best premade fondue at the grocery store.
- Emmi Original Fondue
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When it comes to the best cheese fondue, there is one brand you can trust: Emmi. Both of the best fondue packets we found are made by them and, frankly, they aren’t terribly different. You can’t go wrong with either, but we found Swiss Knight (see #1) to be just a little bit smoother than the Emmi Original Fondue. The first ingredient listed on the box of Emmi Original is “hard and semisoft cheese,” while the Emmi Swiss Knight fondue specifically lists “Switzerland Swiss cheese” as its first ingredient. Otherwise, the ingredients are the same. Both taste boozy and a little funky and delicious. I would truly eat this with little cubes of bread every day if high cholesterol didn’t run in my family.
Credit: Merc / Emmi
- Emmi Swiss Knight
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It’s boozy. It’s cheesy. It has precisely the right salty bite. Emmi Swiss Knight is the best fondue cheese, and it just happens to be the premade fondue I see most often in grocery stores. The pull is incredible—when you dunk a piece of bread in this fondue cheese, you truly have to twirl and twirl to get the cheese pull to break. In my professional, I-have-actually-been-to-Switzerland opinion, it’s pretty much perfect. If you like slightly stinky, boozy, molten cheese, you are going to really flip for this.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
Runner-Up
Best of the Best
Other products we tried: Mifroma Fondue, Emporium Selection Fondue
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!