Milk: Quality, Consumer Interest Research Abound in Top Three Dairy States

Talbot says as many as eight applicants will receive $25,000 worth of support each, to develop a protocept, while receiving elite mentorship from marketing, packaging, and distribution experts. “Select applicants will also receive an expense-paid business development trip to California, to tour dairy farms and processing facilities, and to meet with industry leaders that will help drive the success of their new ventures,” he adds. “The winner will receive up to $250,000 worth of support to get their new product to market.”

The Real California Milk Accelerator competition is open to any persons who are legal residents of one of the 50 United States or the District of Columbia, are at least 18 years of age (or the age of majority in their state of residence if greater than 18), and who offer a promising liquid cow’s milk concept.

Applications for the competition were due Aug. 31, 2019. The judging process culminates with the announcement of the winner on Nov. 8, 2019, in the San Francisco Bay area.

Beverage Innovation Center

A new Beverage Innovation Center is in the works in America’s Dairyland at the Madison, Wis.-based University of Wisconsin (UW) Center for Dairy Research (CDR), according to John Lucey, PhD, UW professor of Food Science and CDR director. “The Beverage Innovation Center will allow the CDR to work with companies and entrepreneurs to develop shelf stable milk-based beverages,” Dr. Lucey says. “We expect to be fully operational by June 2020.”

A $750,000 grant awarded in April 2019 by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, along with a $250,000 grant from the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, are funding the Beverage Innovation Center.

“We will have a 3,000-square-foot pilot plant outfitted with the specialized equipment needed to run small batches of extended shelf life and aseptic beverages,” Dr. Lucey relates. “We will also provide technical assistance to dairy producers and entrepreneurs that want to create new beverages using milk and milk-based ingredients. When the Beverage Innovation Center is up and running, we believe there will be no other public facility quite like it in the United States.”

Relative to packaging in the Beverage Innovation Center, Dr. Lucey says the initial goal is to have a small-scale, aseptic bottling system that has undergone some validation as being safe for human consumption. “We plan to set up a system that will be able to generate a couple hundred bottles from a single batch within about two hours,” he relates. “In the future, we hope to explore pouch packaging possibilities.”

Shelf-stable beverages that contain some dairy ingredients are an area of promising growth and innovation for the dairy industry, Dr. Lucey points out. “These products offer high-quality dairy proteins and can have other unique characteristics like being lactose free,” he says. “In addition, since these products are stable and have a long shelf life, they could potentially be exported.”

Exciting Quality and Safety Tools

Data analytics and molecular biology are two of the most exciting tools available for determining milk quality and safety today, according to Martin Wiedmann, PhD, Gellert family professor of food safety in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

These tools are especially important in light of what Dr. Wiedmann believes are the biggest quality and safety issues presently impacting fluid milk: post-pasteurization microbiological contamination and spore-forming spoilage organisms surviving pasteurization.

“Microbial spoilage issues occurring due to postprocessing contamination can largely be addressed with improved cleaning and sanitation of equipment that contacts milk after the pasteurization stage, particularly fillers and filler areas,” Dr. Wiedmann advises.

Gram-positive psychrotolerant endospore-forming bacteria (simply stated as spore formers) represent a more challenging problem in terms of microbial spoilage, Dr. Wiedmann says. “These organisms can survive many types of pasteurization heat treatments, and then they can germinate and grow during subsequent refrigerated storage,” he relates.