What is cheese?
Cheese is what you get from the milk of cows, goats, sheep and other mammals, by coagulating the milk and drain off the whey. This is accomplished by first acidification with a bacterial culture and then adding an enzyme to coagulate the milk.

The spray drying process of cheese powder
Cheese powder is mainly used in dips, dressings, biscuits, chips and direct as flavouring on hot dishes like spaghetti and soups. In order to spray dry cheese it is necessary to bring it into a liquid form. This is done by a normal melting process where the cheese rind, if any, is removed, the cheese is disintegrated, and during heating and agitation, melting salts, such as phosphates and citrates, are added together with water.

The aim is to obtain a solid content of about 35 % and a temperature of 75oC in order to get a feed, which is not too viscous for atomization. The drying is done in a conventional dryer. The cooling of the powder is done in a VIBRO-FLUIDIZER™ supplied with ambient air in the first section and cold dehumidified air in the last section.

The integrated belt dryer FILTERMAT™ has proved especially advantageous for cheese powder, as it is discharged in an agglomerated form. Further the fines fraction is practically zero and does thus not present any operational problems.

As a certain amount of aroma is lost during the drying it is recommended to use aged cheese. In order to avoid problems with the odour form the exhaust air this may be filtered through activated carbon filters.