Coen Akkerman: more profit from cheese
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The cheese market is highly competitive, and cheese manufacturers are constantly focusing on maximizing the output of the cheese making process. Based on NIZO food research’s expertise in optimizing cheese productions, a new customer requested to optimize their cheese production line.
All processes more profitable
NIZO food research’s scientists not only improved the process parameters of the actual cheese production line (like increasing the capacity of the heating equipment by dedicated computer models), but they investigated and improved the entire process chain. They optimized the pretreatment of the milk (storage, heating) in such a way that protein inclusion in the cheese matrix was maximized, and they were able to find the right balance in the concentration of the cheese ingredients with respect to coagulation time. In this way, the cheese yield increased up to 10%, and a cheese of constant quality could be produced from different production lines.
Not only cheese manufacturing
“It was especially NIZO’s extensive knowledge about how processing conditions affect the quality of the product that helped us tremendously,” a representative of the cheese company comments. NIZO Scientist Coen Akkerman adds: “this was a very successful project, aiming at the improvement of cheese production – but the same principles that we used to optimize this process also apply to many other processes in the food industry. Most foods basically consist of protein, fat and carbohydrates, just like cheese!”