By: Rob Ralyea, Senior Extension Assocate, Cornell Dairy Foods Extension
Much like spring in the fields and woods brings new arrivals to our wildlife friends, so have new arrivals been occurring in the Cornell Food Science pilot plant in the form of new equipment. Our most recent arrival is a KNA-3 Greek yogurt separator manufactured by GEA/Westphalia. It made its inaugural greek yogurt on April 21st and is now ready for product development use.
To enhance the ability to simulate plant conditions, we also had holding tubes arrive, donated by a group of individuals (Sean Creedon, John Dika, Eric Hallstead, Chuck Riley and Howard Van Buren). These are now installed as an extended holding tube which gives us the capability of much longer holding times than what we previously had.
What good is a greek yogurt run or any yogurt run for that matter if you can’t put in in a cup? In March, our Modern Packaging 6 ounce rotary cup filler arrived as well which gives us the capability of mechanically filling and sealing production runs of yogurt. It also has fruit filling capability and having been made in a licensed plant, would give a company the ability to do small product development runs and then use the product for consumer testing or shelf life studies.
Just when you cheese folks were going to stop reading I get to interest YOU. We also have some new cheese equipment that has arrived. From Qualtech we have received our new curd milling machine pictured below. Quite frankly, it is the cat’s meow compared to the old milling machine we had. It is very safety oriented and does a phenomenal job at milling cheese into very uniform pieces.
We also have received our horizontal press, also made by Qualtech. This one is capable of doing from two to 88 2 lb wheels and is very user friendly. It has individual air pressure controls for each tier and does a nice job of pressing our microperforated molds.
And, not to be left out in the cold (pardon the pun), for you ice cream enthusiasts…….we have received our Emery Thompson batch freezers. We have a new 5 gallon batch freezer and a 6 quart batch freezer.
We are anticipating the arrival of a 500 gallon vat pasteurizer/cheese vat in the merry month of May to conclude the latest round of our spring new arrivals. If you have an interest in doing product development in the Food Production and Development laboratory, feel free to contact me at rdr10@cornell.edu. We have also instituted an incubator type policy for people wanting to start in the dairy industry. For more information, feel free to contact me if this is also something that might interest you.
