Canadians are among the top cheese consumers on this planet. The product’s versatility combined with the pomp and circumstance of importing protected varieties has made cheese shopping an art. This art centres around dairy microbes, which, through aging, gives each cheese type their distinct flavours. Canada may have a supply managed dairy sector, but it has not stopped Canadian cheese manufacturers from innovating the product, particularly to improve the shelf life of an increasingly expensive food product. Food spoilage, overall, is responsible for at least 30 per cent of food waste and, despite visually being the most obvious and expected dairy products to spoil, consumers are less likely to complain about cheese mold than other products. Given the risk of food-borne illnesses, shelf-life innovations, including bioprotectants, will be valuable in the cheese sector.
Some factors encouraging spoilage are fairly obvious from a food safety perspective: low salt, long aging processes, and high temperatures are some of the most common weaknesses that can increase mold susceptibility of certain cheeses. Artisanal cheeses, too, are prone to spoilage due to the quantity of bacteria within those types of cheese; pasteurization, which is not required for artisanal cheese types, would inoculate the bacteria in raw milk. Further, the prevalence of antibiotic and chemical resistance is increasing, necessitating commercially available preservatives that reduce bacterium hospitality for cheese environments and the subsequent legal risks of illness or recalls.
Cheese matrix restrictions mean the ability to mix additives into the production process is possible, but with strict conditions so that a cheddar can still be labelled a cheddar. The efficacy of control methods can be impacted by its own role in the cheese profile. Bioprotection subsequently relies on understanding the problem the additive is attempting to solve, cheese type, regulatory conditions, and label restrictions. By purpose, there are four main types of bioprotectant: antibacterial control, antifungal control, enzyme stabilization, and bioprotective cultures. For the remainder of this blog, we will focus on bioprotective cultures (BCs), which are added directly into the cheese matrix for vat inoculation or, depending on product, can be sprayed as a coating prior to aging.
Fundamentally, improving shelf life with BCs must have a minimal impact on cheese nutrition and sensory properties, which comes from ensuring added bacterial cultures do not negatively impact starter cultures (i.e. the base of the visual/flavour/texture profile). The role of BCs is therefore not in reducing the presence of adverse bacteria but in creating an environment with more competition for pathogens. Without a more streamlined production system that can scale BC development of an optimized formula, BCs are likely to remain, for now, a novel technology.
The reality of the situation is that very few additives are approved for use in cheeses and even fewer options in the BCs segment. Some may point to health and safety concerns of preservatives however, given the additive nature of BCs, they are subject to sales weight-based maximum residue limits and maximum BC depth measurements, with standards varying by a small degree depending on the type of cheese and BC used. One product, for example, Holdbac YM, has slightly different formulations depending on whether it will be used for white or yellow cheese production. The ability to update use information will be limited by commercial BC availability. To put the lack of options into perspective, Listeria – a dangerous bacterium that can present in soft, unpasteurized cheeses and with a mortality rate of at least 20 per cent – has three effective BCs approved in Canada, and very little research has looked into how a combination of BCs looks in practice. What is known is that a combination of BC strategies requires additional considerations of how the added culture interacts with the preexisting cheese environment and pathogens, and an effective control is likely signalled by a faster milk acidification step.
Cheese BCs have the potential to be an incredibly lucrative business, with a 2027 predicted global value of $113 trillion if the cost efficiency of production can be improved. Improving cheese shelf life would improve our ability to trade different types of cheeses, especially those regionally protected. A market available combination of starter and BC (i-Culture) has the potential to add a week of life to the products it is used in; this is predicted to reduce supply chain food waste by 40 per cent. However, with most strains costing $0.06 per kg (which may not seem like much given maximum residue limits, but keep in mind commercial dairies work with hundreds of thousands of litres of milk a day) and the added value to dairy varying by such a wide range, cost of employment remains the primary barrier to mainstreamed BCs. For an already pricy product like cheese, we cannot afford to leave food innovations in the laboratory, especially if they have the potential to progress food security efforts.
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