SMART-RIPE research project to improve cheese manufacturing process

A new EU-funded research project, SMART-RIPE, aims to improve the cheese manufacturing process by adopting sequential ventilation procedures and a new monitoring concept in ripening rooms.

The two-year project, which is funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission, will bring together the efforts of 11 partners, including three research centres, to develop an innovative technology for cheese ripening.

It will implement sequential ventilation procedures in cheese ripening rooms using advancements in the field of smart systems, wireless technology, and sensor technology.

The sequential ventilation concept helps reduce energy consumption and control the rate of cheese mass loss, while preserving the quality attributes.

FP6 TRUEFOOD, an earlier project on cheese ripening, showed that the sequential ventilation concept could save around 50% of energy consumption in ripening rooms, and defined strategies to control cheese mass loss.

The SMART-RIPE technology is expected to have great value in the cheese segment, due to its ability to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of cheese ripening procedures.

It will enable cheese manufacturers to control ripening rooms, as well as provide them with access to information about the status of the ripening room.

In addition, the system will be auto-loaded with data on the ripening process, which can be used to continually improve the process.

The parties involved in the SMART-RIPE project are the research centres INRA-GMPA (France), NAGREF- DEMETER (Greece) and Teagasc (Ireland); technological SMEs Constructions agro alimentaires et Pharmaceutiques (C2AP) (France), Bioval Process (France), Biosystems Engineering (Ireland) and IRIS (Spain); and cheese manufacturing SMEs Skarfi (Greece), Cooleeney (Ireland), Société Fromagère du Livradois (France) and Coopérative Fromagère de Planèze (France).