Teagasc: Saudi cheese venture the shape of things to come

A highly innovative new cheese manufacturing technology developed by Teagasc's Dairy Innovation Centre in conjunction with the Irish Dairy Board (IDB) has the potential to open up new markets for Irish dairy products and create entirely new ranges and categories of cheese.

While chocolate flavoured cheese in the shape of Mickey Mouse may not be to everyone's taste it is just one of the possibilities opened up by the new cheese technology platform (NCTP) which reverses the traditional cheese making process and creates a range of new innovative opportunities for the Irish dairy sector.

The first of these opportunities has already become a reality with the announcement last week by the IDB of a €20 million investment in the development of a cheese manufacturing plant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The facility will use Irish dairy ingredients to produce a range of fresh white cheeses that appeal to local market tastes.

Conventional cheese manufacture is an age-old technology which involves milk, a starter culture, coagulant and salt. At its simplest it is a three step process involving the gelation of milk by added rennet; the dehydration of the gel to a curd which accounts for about 10 per cent of the original milk weight and the simultaneous expression of whey making up the remaining 90 per cent of milk weight. And, ripening of the curd under defined conditions of temperature and humidity, resulting in its conversion to cheese with the desired functional and taste characteristics.

At first glance the whey may appear to be a waste product but it is far from that. It is rich in lactose, minerals, and vitamins and is used in a range of products including nutritional supplements and infant formula.

This means that the utmost care must be taken to ensure the purity and quality of the whey being expressed during the cheese making process and this limits the scope for adding flavourings, colourants or bioactive ingredients lest they contaminate it.

The new process overcomes this problem by eliminating the expression of whey. It does this by effectively extracting the constituents of the milk that go into cheese making and creating a liquid pre-cheese which can then be reassembled to create almost any cheese you want by using a patented manufacturing process also designed by the team at the Dairy Innovation Centre.

Lot of capability
"We developed the process as part of an Enterprise Ireland funded project," says Dr Tim Guinee, principal research officer at Teagasc Food Research. "The liquid pre-cheese allows a lot of capability for innovation and facilitates the introduction of materials which would otherwise be lost in the expression of whey and could contaminate the whey as well. We already add colour in the making of some cheeses such as cheddars and we have to be very careful in doing that to ensure that it doesn't get into the whey – this is not a problem with the new process."

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Just taking out the relevant constituents and mixing them back together again later will almost certainly not produce the cheese you are looking for or even produce cheese at all.

“The milk proteins have to be rehydrated in the absence of fat and they have to be designed to deliver the particular properties you are looking for”, explains Guinee.

“These are what we call smart ingredients with smart standing for scientifically modified, adaptable, robust technology.

“The process requires in-depth knowledge of milk proteins and their functionality and the impact they will have on cheese properties such as melting point, structure, stringiness, succulence and so on. The process of conversion is also very important and we have designed a technology which can allow companies anywhere in the world to take the ingredients and turn them into the cheese they want.”

This is where the IDB Saudi Arabian investment comes in.

"The beauty of our process is that it doesn't require a local milk supply", he points out. "We can supply the technology to a firm and they can import the ingredients from Ireland to manufacture cheeses designed for local tastes. This could be very important for Ireland as a dairy exporting nation."

The Riyadh plant will be used for the production of fresh white cheese which is hugely popular in the Middle East.

The facility will also include an Innovation Hub for the continued research and development of white cheese technologies.

It will initially supply dairy products to the Saudi Arabian market and eventually become a manufacturing hub for the region.

"We are delighted to be collaborating with the Irish Dairy Board in applying the technologies developed in the food research centre in Moorepark", says Prof Paul Ross, head of the Teagasc food research programme.

“The ambition is to continue to develop a pipeline of new innovative products to meet specific consumer and customer needs in key global markets for the Irish Dairy Board. This will contribute to the returns farmers receive for the milk they produce.”

Further commercial products in the collaborative development pipeline include a continental type cheese targeted for the key German market and due for launch in 2014 as well as cheeses aimed at health conscious consumers and focused on the UK cheese market which is valued at in excess of £2.5 billion per annum.

And the possibilities don’t end there. “The key point is that because the process doesn’t involve whey expression we retain everything we add to the cheese”, notes Guinee.

"This means that we can make it to any flavour and colour we like – even chocolate to appeal to children. We can also make it in any shape or mould, even Disney characters. And we can look at making sweet cheeses to appeal to Asian tastes and distance to those markets won't be a problem because we can set up plants there and just export the ingredients. This well help create valuable new markets for our additional dairy output following the ending of the quota in 2015."