DENVER (KDVR) – James “Jim” Leprino, a Colorado businessman nicknamed the “Willy Wonka of cheese,” died Thursday, according to his namesake company.
Leprino, born in 1937, grew up in Denver, and worked in his father’s corner store as a teen, according to a release issued by Leprino (formerly Leprino Foods) on Thursday. One of his duties there was making cheese for the city’s Italian community.
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In an interview with Forbes in 2017, the then-79-year-old billionaire spoke about how his family’s grocery store in Little Italy eventually became the world’s largest producer of mozzarella cheese. His private nature, and his prominence in the cheese industry, prompted Forbes to dub him the “Willy Wonka of cheese.”
He told the outlet that in 1956, after graduating high school, he began working at his father’s market full-time. But the store was forced to close a few years later, prompting Leprino to try focusing solely on cheese…