Cheese by-product has new lease of life

Press, 28 July 1976, Page 22

Cheese by-product has new lease of life

From .T. N. HUTCHISON. San Francisco. The cheese industry, which has dumped oceans of whey into the rivers and drains of the world for centuries because it could not be sold, now sees the stuff as rising swiftly in saleability. The world’s biggest whey-processing plant has opened in California, and the corporation which owns it predicts that the American market for whey products will triple by 1980. Stauffer Chemical Company is a huge multinational firm with its executive headquarters in San Francisco and extensive operations in the Pacific Basin, Latin America, and Europe. It completed the plant at Visalia, California, recently. The plant has a capacity of 600 M lb of raw whey a year. It produces partially delactosed whey, whey protein concentrate, and food grade loctose, using a Stauffer proprietary process. Food manufacturers find these products finctionally and nutritionally excellent. A large national

bakery corporation has begun production of bread in which whey protein replacing a portion of the fiour customarily used, doubles the protein nutrition of the loaf. A very large new market for whey protein is expected to develop with a change in national food regulations premitting the products generous use in ice-cream. Americans ate about 700 M imperial gallons of ice-cream last year. Such a market can gulp down a large portion of the 30,D00M lb of raw whey generated annually in the United States. At least four other large firms in the United States are whey-processors, and some compete directly with the New Zealand dairy industry in export trade, particularly in Asia. A Stauffer executive said that through the company’s international arm it was associated with international efforts to improve whey products in other parts of the world. He noted that the New Zealand Dairy Research Council was highly regarded as a leader in dairy technology. The whey fractionation plant was designed to make maximum use of the dissolved solids in the raw product. Acid whey is blended, passed through a bank of centrifuges and then through what are known as ultrafiltration membranes, which separ-

ate the proteins from minerals and lactose. The proteins are then concentrated in a low-tempera-tur evaporator to remove water, and finally are spray-dried. The permeate which passes the membranes in separately concentrated, first to remove lactose crystals and finally to extract other food and feed products Government environmentalists have encouraged whey processing, to reduce the serious pollution of water resources which results from the dumping of surplus whey. The Wellington correspondent of “The Press” reports that scientists at the Dairy Research Institute have developed their own techniques for using whey solids. A Dairy Board spokesman, said ’ that the commercial use of these techniques had been delayed in New Zealand because so much capital was required in protein extraction. These techniques would eventually be used as all the technical data and expertise were already available. He said the dairy industry expected to invest between S3OM and S4OM this year, including building new cheese plants, financing facilities to produce new caseinates (another form of dairy protein). the upgrading of existing plants, and the construction of new fats facilities.