Improving Cheese Ripening Processes

A new E.U.-research project, SMARTRIPE, aims to bring a number of improvements in cheese ripening technology by adopting sequential ventilation procedures and a new monitoring concept in cheese ripening rooms. The SMARTRIPE project builds on the results of previous FP6 TRUEFOOD project on cheese ripening. These results proved the concept of “sequential ventilation” as a mean to save around 50 percent of energy consumption in ripening rooms, and defined strategies to control cheese mass loss (cheese water evaporation) while preserving cheese quality attributes. This two-year research project funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission aims to develop a new technology for cheese ripening.