| Production Area | Worldwide |
| Origin | England |
| Milk | Cow milk |
| Pasteurized | Frequently |
| Texture | Hard/Semi-hard |
| Fat content | 33% (typical) |
| Protein content | 25% (typical) |
| Aging time | 3 months - 4+ years |
Cheddar has perhaps always been the most popular cheese in England. A pipe roll of King Henry II records the purchase of 10,420 pounds at a farthing a pound.
The term Cheddar is also used to refer to a family of hard aged cheeses. Cheeses such as Gloucester, Cheshire, Leicester, Stilton, Lancashire, Derby, Wensleydale, French Cantal, and Caerphilly all belong to the Cheddar family. Cheddaring refers to an additional step in the production of cheddar-style cheese where the curd is cut into cubes, stacked, and turned.
Like many cheeses, the colour of cheddar is often modified by the use of food colourings. Annatto, extracted from a tropical tree, is frequently used to give cheddar an orange colour. The origins of this practice are clouded, but the three leading theories appear to be to allow the cheese to have a consistent colour from batch to batch, to assist the purchaser in identifying the type of cheese when it is unlabelled, or to identify the cheese's region of origin. In the United States, cheddar that has not been coloured is frequently labelled as "white cheddar" or "Vermont cheddar", regardless of whether it was produced in the state of Vermont.
The United States Department of Agriculture uses three measures to track the dairy industry: milk, butter, and 40-pound blocks of cheddar, reporting the prices and production weekly.
Cheddar cheese is matured for varying amounts of time: the longer it is matured, the stronger the flavour. It is often sold with labels such as "mild", "medium", "sharp", "tasty", "mature", "extra sharp", "extra mature", and so on.
White House historians aver that U.S. president Andrew Jackson held an open house party where a 1,400 pound block of cheddar cheese was served as refreshment. A cheese of 7,000 pounds was produced in Ingersoll, Ontario in 1866 and exhibited in New York and Britain; it was immortalised in the famous poem "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds" by James McIntyre, widely alleged to be the worst poet in all of Canadian literature. A still larger Wisconsin Cheddar cheese of 34,951 pounds was produced for the New York World's Fair in 1964. It required the equivalent of the daily milk production of 16,000 cows.
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