DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences (DuPont) today announced the launch of CHOOZIT^® BC 02, a new phage alternative for cheese makers looking to meet the increasing global demand for pizza cheese and meet consumers’ preference in terms of pizza cheese browning.

Part of the DuPont™ Danisco^® portfolio of ingredients, the new culture joins CHOOZIT^® BC 01 as a proprietary formulation designed to assist cheese makers to create added value and flexibility for their food service customers: enabling them to achieve a consistent quality pizza cheese in a wide range of ovens around the world, day after day.

The CHOOZIT^® BC cultures offer key advantages, including robust processing conditions, browning control, better flexibility for pizza baking in oven conveyors, consistent cheese quality with no change in texture before shredding and a lower risk of spoilage – all in a natural, label friendly solution.

The cultures are clean label solutions to control browning, unlike many alternatives on the market that are formulated with additives. CHOOZIT^® BC helps pizza cheese makers meet consumer preferences for natural products, while using less water in production, a lower volume of whey and less energy for whey drying.

Pizza cheese makers had long struggled to achieve consumers’ preferred cheese browning color using natural solutions, until last year’s successful roll-out of CHOOZIT^® BC 01 in the European market. To date, CHOOZIT^® BC 01 is in commercial use by a significant number of leading pizza cheese producers and in approval phases in key countries around the broader European region. These countries represent roughly 77% of the total pizza cheese produced in Europe¹.

“As demand rises across the global pizza industry, pizza cheese makers have looked for solutions to make substantial improvement on the quality and consistency of their product,” said Annie Mornet, global product manager, Cheese Cultures at DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences. “We introduced CHOOZIT^® BC 01 last year and found that customers are very pleased with its unique performance. Pizza cheese makers have confirmed that CHOOZIT^® BC 01 gives much better browning control for the same cheese quality, and for some particular pizza cheese manufacturing processes manufacturers have been able to use 25% less water in the pizza cheese process.

“CHOOZIT^® BC 02 takes it a step further,” she continued, “with CHOOZIT^® BC 02 we present an even stronger offering to cheese producers who need to produce in industrial volumes. The cultures have been designed to provide the right acidification kinetics and proteolytic features to manage the yield and mineralization of the cheese. The metabolism of the different species allows for a better consumption of the sugars, especially galactose, throughout the process. Moreover, CHOOZIT^® BC 01 and 02 are a biodiverse and alternative formulation leading to a higher robustness and limiting the phages issues.”