Guest Columns

Perspective:
Dairy Research

40 years of innovation, impact — celebrating CDR’s 40th anniversary

John Lucey

John Lucey, director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, contributes this column for Cheese Market News®.

This year, the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) is celebrating its 40th anniversary. In recognition of this milestone, I’d like to highlight some of the ways that the center has supported the dairy industry over those 40 years.

• Specialty cheese

Last year, for the first time, Wisconsin cheesemakers produced 1 billion pounds of specialty cheese. This is a remarkable achievement for Wisconsin cheesemakers and is the result of hard work by a lot of people and various organizations. By contrast, in 1993, the state only produced 83 million pounds. By 2009, specialty cheese production in Wisconsin totaled 477 million pounds. We’ve come a long way in a relatively short period of time.

A big push toward specialty cheese started in the early 1990s, when Wisconsin cheesemakers, many of them operating smaller plants, began to turn to specialty cheese to differentiate themselves from larger producers of commodity products. Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin (DFW) created a dedicated Specialty Cheese program at the CDR run by Jim Path and supported by staff like Mark Johnson and John Jaeggi. DFW helped plants with marketing, and CDR provided technical support and training. Over the years, CDR staff have developed countless varieties and recipes for many different cheeses, and created artisan short courses focused on specialty cheese varieties from more than 10 different European countries.

The Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker program, developed by CDR with funding from DFW, has also played a pivotal role in supporting Wisconsin specialty cheese by providing an opportunity for experienced cheesemakers to further elevate their craft. This program includes a rigorous selection process, a combination of course work, plant visits, product sampling and a comprehensive exam. Since the first class graduated in 1997, more than 100 people have earned the title of Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker. (For more on this year’s graduating Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker class, see coverage on page 49 of this issue.)

• Growing exports

An important area of focus is increasing the amounts of dairy products that are exported. Recently, cheese exports from the U.S. topped the 1-billion-pound mark for the first time. More than 25 years ago, the CDR, with funding from DFW and the national dairy checkoff program, created a whey/dairy ingredients program.

One of the key objectives of that program has been to support exports of whey protein, permeate and other milk protein powders. The CDR continues to support the growth of exports in a number of ways, including conducting research and innovation projects, exploring the application of these dairy products in various foods, participating in buyers’ missions and conducting overseas training/education. Over the years, our staff have traveled to various regions of the world like Latin America, Southeast Asia and China to provide their expertise in support of the use of U.S. dairy products. Through research, CDR has developed methods to extend the shelf life of various types of cheeses so that they can be shipped to foreign countries while retaining high quality and performance. CDR staff have also helped adjust the make processes so that cheeses and dairy products produced for foreign markets suit their local tastes, flavors and formats.

• Whey protein

Forty years ago, whey was viewed as a low-value byproduct of the cheesemaking process and sold mostly for use in animal feed. Today, the global whey protein market is estimated to be valued at around $10 billion. The key process technology that has enabled this revolution is membrane filtration. At the CDR, we have built small-scale processing units to do every type of filtration separation (reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration and microfiltration). In the pilot plant, we identified optimum separation conditions for producing ever more complex products from the initial WPC34 (designed to match the protein content of nonfat dry milk powder) to the high-protein concentrates and isolates. For the past 30 years, our staff have annually conducted training courses or labs for industry and university students. Our staff have also helped the industry understand the functionality (e.g., solubility, gelation) of their products and applications (e.g., in beverages and baked foods).

• Education and training

The CDR estimates that about 25,000 dairy industry professionals have attended a short course that CDR organized or supported. Over the years, CDR short courses have grown and expanded from less than 10 offerings about 20 years ago, to last year when the CDR held 29 open enrollment short courses and 17 private company training sessions. These courses help provide a trained workforce for the dairy industry to enable them to produce safe, high-quality, innovative dairy products.

The CDR is also proud to help train graduate students; many go on to work as research and development professionals in the dairy industry. In the past 40 years, around 300 graduate students in food science, working on a dairy-related topic, have completed their studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, usually with assistance from CDR staff or use of our facilities.

• DBIA/entrepreneurship

In 2012, CDR was given a national innovation award that allowed the center to bring on staff focused on providing business development support to dairy businesses. Then, in 2018, CDR was named a regional center by the USDA for our Dairy Business Innovation Alliance (DBIA) program, which is a partnership with the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association (WCMA). The goal of the program is to help grow the dairy industry and has several objectives including on-farm diversification (i.e., helping farmers produce their own dairy products), creation of more value-added dairy products, improving sustainability of processing and growing dairy exports. Since it was established, the DBIA has awarded nearly $24 million across more than 290 grants to help grow Midwestern dairy farmsteads (on-farm production of dairy products) and businesses within its 11-state region.

• Research and some other areas

Over the years, CDR has conducted research on a wide range of topics including formation of calcium lactate and many other defects, adjuncts to provide sweeter Cheddars, biofilms and microbiological contaminants, and many other topics. Our cheese applications staff have done countless trials for suppliers and manufacturers to evaluate most of the new ingredients that have been brought into our industry and explored new processes.

Cheese yield and milk standardization options have long been a focus for CDR. In the 1980s, Mark Johnson created a milk standardization software program that helped cheese plants evaluate the economic impact of different decisions. The center has also extensively studied the use of concentrated milk from membrane filtration in cheesemaking. Those results have been reported in publications, conferences and, perhaps most importantly, shared and discussed with FDA, which has signaled that it will finally permit both ultrafiltered and microfiltered milk to be used in standard of identity cheeses.

Other CDR highlights include the formation of the April cheese conference in the early 1990s, hosted jointly by CDR and WCMA, and the creation of a dairy food safety program at CDR in the mid-1990s, initiated and funded by DFW.

In closing, I want to acknowledge Norm Olson, who helped create CDR and was its first director. Norm developed the partnership with the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board (now DFW) to help create and fund the CDR. Rusty Bishop, who was the next director, helped establish many of the programs that we still see in the CDR today.

We are extremely grateful to the Wisconsin dairy farmers who contribute daily to the checkoff program that supports marketing and research; without their vision, there would not have been a CDR. I also want to thank our industry partners — there is a wonderful collaborative spirit in our dairy community. We look forward to supporting the dairy industry for many years to come.

CMN

The views expressed by CMN’s guest columnists are their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of Cheese Market News®.

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