Increasing productivity
The influence of the 5 M's on value creation
in semi-hard cheese
Christian Niebuhr, Head of Application, Central Europe, mobile: +49 172 519 9307,
email: dechn@chr-hansen.com, and Dr. Hendrik Buschendorf, Business Development Manager,
Central Europe, mobile: +49 173 702 7412, email: dehebu@chr-hansen.com; Chr. Hansen GmbH -
Große Drakenburger Strasse 93-97 - 31582 Nienburg / Weser, Germany www.chr-hansen.com
IDM ¦ Ingredients
"If you stop getting better, you have stopped being good."
Philip Rosenthal (Porzellan Manufaktur Rosenthal, Germany)
Every day, and in each cheese, dairy cheesemakers work
hard to obtain and improve productivity. But the dairy industry
and the specific product conditions make this mission
complicated. The raw material, milk, that is processed
varies in physical, chemical (milk components) and microbiological
(germ flora) proportion 365 days a year. The cheese to be produced
must nevertheless consistently meet the specification and
at the same time give nothing away. Keeping the expensive plant
technology assets in the optimal range is a constant challenge in
the cheese process. Right in the middle of this challenging environment
is the cheesemaker, who has to control all of this, to
correct, to adapt and furthermore to optimize – who can master
all of this? It is stated that what you can measure, you can also
improve. Accordingly certain parameters and their measurement
are part of the cheesemakers job to ease his work. The challenge
lies in the details of the measurement, the quality and quantity of
the data, the validity and the systematics behind. This ultimately
leads to the measurement method itself. In other words, how reliable,
precise and very importantly how well it can be applied in
production reality.
In order to lay out all of these aspects, and to show a central
starting point for increasing productivity in semi-hard cheese dairies,
the cause-effect diagram originally developed by the Japanese
professor Ishikawa is a good starting point (cf. Figure 1).
30 · January/February 2022 ¦ international-dairy.com
The selection of the 5 M's reflects the previously presented
essential environment of cheesemakers and classifies them: material,
machinery, (cheese) maker, measurement and method. The
focus here is quite deliberately on the cheesemaker as the middle
point. How can they be supported to improve the productivity of
the cheese dairy in the given environment of the 5 M’s? Following
the flow logic of the diagram, the starting point is measurement
and the methods.
The right cutting time of the curd
Central to the cheese process – and at the same time the variable
that has a direct influence on productivity – is the time at which
the cheese curd is cut. If this takes place at a defined firmness
the chances are good that the milk component recovery into the
cheese and whey, dry matter in the cheese and losses of fines are,
to a large extent, in the expected range. Chr. Hansen, together
with Rheolution, have developed a new method for precisely supporting
this purpose: the CoaguSens™.
CoaguSens to balance and stabilize
cheese making
CoaguSens is an innovative answer to the dairy industry's need for
better control of curd coagulation. The device was developed by
and for cheesemakers. Basically, this measuring device can be used
to optimize automatic procedures and to collect production data
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