Sustainability is very much on everyone’s lips these days and, as Chairman of the Scientific Committee, I am pleased to say that our session on “Sustainability in Cheese Production” at the IDF Cheese Science & Technology Symposium in Bergen, Norway, 4-6 June 2024, have attracted many abstracts on the subject. The keynote speaker, Professor Julien Chamberlain, has been Professor of Dairy Science at Université Laval in Canada since 2020, focusing on research to improve process control and efficiency in cheese production. In his Keynote, he will focus on how the cheese industry can get the most out of its cheese production and reduce the footprint of cheese production by valorising cheese by-products, and the challenges that different production and scales pose in this regard.
It was a difficult decision to choose oral speakers between the other abstracts for this session. We could actually have spent the whole day discussing sustainable cheese production. The other two oral presentations selected for this session will discuss different approaches to optimising performance and improving sustainability in cheese production.
Assistant Professor Prateek Sharma from Utah State University, who focuses on understanding structure-function relationships in cheese, will talk about how a materials science approach can be used to improve the sustainability of cheese processing by minimising waste emissions, reducing manufacturing costs and implementing strict quality control measures. PhD student Manon Perrignon from Agrocampus Ouest in France will discuss how a statistical approach such as Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO), which is based on artificial intelligence, can be used to optimise the overall performance of cheese production. Her presentation will show how MOO was used to improve the overall performance of a cheese production plant.
In addition, the poster session within the Sustainability in Cheese Production session is quite broad and covers many of the issues that the industry needs to address in terms of sustainability. It will cover aspects related to the use of different rennets, how the management system at the farm influences cheese production, water use in a dairy, whey utilisation, cleaning strategies and mass calculations. I would like to highlight one abstract that focuses on Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) in cheese production. In a poster to be presented by Dr Zorana Miloradovic from the University of Belgrade, they used a simplified life cycle assessment to estimate the carbon footprint of different types of cheese, taking into account cheese mass and nutritional value. Teagasc PhD student Karan Pant will present a poster evaluating current CIP practices using a test bed that mimics industrial conditions. This has allowed him to carry out in-depth studies of fouling during cheese making and the most sustainable CIP practices.
Other sections that have attracted many abstracts were the sessions on cheese structure/functionality/texture and the session on innovations in cheese manufacture and processing of which I will focus on in my next blog posts.
