Overcoming key challenges within cottage cheese blending
Cottage cheese producers face three main challenges when blending cottage cheese – maintaining a consistent curd/dressing ratio and preserving curd structure is difficult in traditional blenders. And often, these blenders don’t empty completely without manual assistance.
1. Maintaining curd/dressing ratio throughout emptying
Maintaining a consistent curd/dressing ratio throughout the emptying process is difficult in traditional blenders without running the agitator very vigorously. If producers run at level of agitation required to maintain the curd/dressing ratio, they damage the curd structure. But if they run the blender more gently, early packages will have too much dressing and the later packages will have too little. Occasionally, producers must stop the blending process and add extra dressing to the later packages to compensate. This makes the process more complex and expensive. Our solution to this challenge is a new vertical blender with an agitator so gentle and efficient that it ensures a homogenous blend throughout the emptying process while preserving curd structure.
2. Preserving curd structure
Cottage cheese curd is very fragile and requires gentle, careful handling. The challenge is to preserve the particle size and shape of the curd while also ensuring a consistently homogenous blend of curd and dressing. The particle shape and size going into the blender should be the same coming out to ensure a high quality product that meets consumer demands. Our new vertical blender, the Tetra Pak® Blender VCC, makes this possible since it maintains curd/dressing ratio at a slower speed than traditional blenders, protecting the curd particles from damage. Trials show that more than 90% of particles are preserved within the accepted particle size range after blending.
3. Complete emptying of blender to reduce product losses
In traditional blenders, there are normally 5 to 25 kilograms of product left in the blender after emptying. This means either a significant loss of product or manual emptying assistance every time to recover the lost product. This requires operators to manually scrape the remaining product out of the blender after every batch run. The vertical design of our Tetra Pak Blender VCC solves this issue. It empties completely without manual assistance, leaving typically no more than two kilograms of product in the blender. This drastically reduces product losses and operator cost while also making the process much easier.
