Shredded mozzarella cheese poses challenges for manufacturers and consumers due to stickiness during shredding, caking of shreds, or growth of mold after packing. One solution is to add starch or cellulose-based flow aids, often with oxygen scavengers or antimycotics. Companies need to be able to quantify the flow-aid for quality assurance reasons, and to protect themselves from fraud when purchasing shredded cheese from others. Starch and cellulose wet chemistry methods are time consuming and require highly trained analysts. We developed a rapid method to quantify starch in shredded mozzarella using Fourier transform near-infrared spectroscopy (FT-NIR). Samples of low-moisture part-skim mozzarella loaves were shredded, and 0 to 10% of a starch/cellulose flow-aid was added. Treatments were ground, weighed, formed into a ball and pressed in the middle of the glass Petri dish with a force of 300 N for 1 min to create a homogeneous scanning surface. Samples were scanned using a Buchi NIRFlex N-500 FT-NIR spectrometer (Buchi Labortechnik AG, CH). NIRCal 5.2 Chemometric Software (Buchi Labortechnik) was used to analyze the spectra after first dividing the spectra of the 154 samples into 102 calibration sets and 52 validation sets. Reducing wavelength regions, adjusting the number of principal components, and pretreatment of spectra using Standard Normal Variate to minimize sample presentation variations, optimized the calibration. The resulting calibration was accurate with an R² of 0.9872, and a SD of 0.3321 when full-fat cheese >4 wk post-purchase, and smoked mozzarella were removed as outliers. Future research will determine if cellulose and starch can be identified and quantified separately in the same sample, and the effect of different starch and cellulose types on quantification. It is likely that different calibrations will be necessary to quantify smoked, aged, and full-fat mozzarella.