With 6.45 million metric tons (MT) of cheese production in 2023, the U.S. cheese market is projected for a 4.64% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and a business of almost $56 billion by 2029. This growth is mainly attributed to the “ready to eat” and foodservice industries. Around 80% of cheese used in the foodservice sector is for the restaurant industries where the functionality of the cheese plays a critical role in its handling.  

Cheese offers a variety of functionalities depending on its end use. Mozzarella-like cheeses, where stretching, melting, oiling off, blistering, and browning characteristics are important for pizza applications. Cheddar and semi-hard cheeses are sliced, diced, or shredded for use in various retail, culinary, and food service applications. Hard cheeses, such as Parmesan and Romano are used in grated or shaved forms. Hardness, viscoelasticity, and stickiness are important qualities of cheese for converting them into different forms.

Structurally, cheese is a complex network of proteins (caseins), in which fat globules, water, minerals, bacteria, and dissolved solutes, such as sugars, acids, salts, free amino acids, and peptides, are all interspersed. The functionality of the cheese is derived from the way all these components are embedded with each other.  

Machinability is a measure of how easy a cheese is to cut, dice, slice, shred, grate, shape, or finish on a machine without incurring a significant material loss (due to sticking or producing fines).

Good slicing or shredding behavior is observed in a narrow range of textural properties, and it is not fully understood, or controlled, by cheese manufacturers. Sliceability is cheese’s ability to cut cleanly into thin slices, resisting breakage or fracture at the edges of the slice. It also must undergo a high level of bending before breaking. On the other hand, shreddability is comparable to sliceability in several physical attributes, such as the ease with which cheese undergoes the machine/operation, retention of the shape and integrity of shreds. 

Good shreddability is showcased by absence of propensity of shreds to mat or clump together, and excessive fines. Intuitively, both sliceability and shreddability depend on the chemistry, microstructural, and rheological properties of the casein network in the cheese. 

During the process of slicing or shredding, fines are generated and there is also a material loss from cheese sticking to the moving parts of machinery or crumbling during high-speed operations. This wearing phenomenon during shredding/slicing / other mechanical operations causes significant financial losses to the cheese manufacturers. 

The machinability of cheese is greatly impacted by cheese manufacturing conditions, intrinsic factors such as composition (e.g., protein, free moisture), age/ripening (extent of proteolysis), temperature (ratio of solid to liquid fat), pH, and solubilization of colloidal calcium phosphate. Extrinsic factors, such as the temperature of cheese block, cutting speed, normal force, type of cutting force (wire versus blade), etc. also play important role in deciding the quality of resulting end products (e.g., shreds, slices, dice, etc.) and the amount of sticking loss and fines.

At present, there are little or no means available to predict cheese machinability attributes. There is a need for developing tools to evaluate shredding/slicing/grating performance of a cheese block using wear behavior, rheological, and textural properties. This information will be invaluable to the cheese industry for evaluating a variety of cheese products for their suitability for various size-reduction operations, which will change the processing conditions to reduce wastage and rework.

In the next article on cheese, we will discuss other important functionalities, such as melting, blistering, browning, stretching, flowability, oiling off, and many more aspects.

About Authors

• Prateek Sharma, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor-Dairy Technology at Utah State University. He has 15-plus years of research experience working in both academia and the dairy industry in multiple countries. He is past chair of IFT Dairy Foods Division and a member of the AMSPAP (Annual Meeting Scientific Programs Advisory Panel) committee.

• Nitin Joshi, Ph.D., CFS, is a Senior Principal, R&D at PepsiCo’ Frito Lay Business. He has more than 30 years of experience in dairy and cheese research and their application in several food products. Dr. Joshi is a past chair of IFT’s AMSPAP, Dairy Foods Division, Hot topics, and Philadelphia section. At present he is a Technical chair at Longhorn section of IFT.

Reference

• U.S. Cheese Market Size, Share & Growth: Forecast [2029] https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/u-s-cheese-market-106630
• USDA FAS (2024). Production-Cheese. https://fas.usda.gov/data/production/commodity/0240000
• Findlay, R. (2022). Restaurant drive cheese sales and usage. https://hoards.com/article-31518-restaurants-drive-cheese-sales-and-usage.html
• Pace, N., Verma, A., Parhi, A., & Sharma, P. (2024). The utility of a slice defect score method in understanding factors impacting the sliceability of commercial Cheddar cheese blocks. International Dairy Journal, 151, 105865.