Chapter 2
I Technology Transported; 1788-1840
II Technology Established; 1840-1940
III The Coming Of Science
IV From Science To Technology: The Post-war Years
V Products And Processes
i Frozen Foods
ii Instant and Convenience Foods
iii Dairy Technology
iv Packaging
VI Conclusion
VII Acknowledgements
References
Index
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In 1945 E H. Daniell, an engineer and a director of Kraft, secured provisional patents for a system similar to that later used in New Zealand [190] but in the flurry of postwar activity they were not developed and cheese mechanization languished until the mid-fifties, when CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratories took up the problem and a team led by J. Czulak developed cheddaring, milling, salting, hooping and pressing equipment.[191] This was something of a tour de force and the machines were commercialized in the 1960s in collaboration with the Australian engineering company, James Bell Machinery Co., with assistance from industry engineers, who tried out prototypes of some of them under factory conditions. Some of this equipment is still used here and overseas, but in the long term the cheddaring machine, in particular, turned out to be only partially successful, largely because it was too complex and was designed to do mechanically what was done by the factory operatives. It would have been better to have observed what cheddaring actually did to the cheese curd and then to have devised a method of achieving that mechanically. Sharkey did this in another Kraft factory in the 1960s, using gravity feed from a tower of star-shaped section to cause the curd to flow and thus to form the desired texture. This system, which is far less complicated, also is used overseas. Mechanization in one form or another and to a greater or lesser extent is now general in the Australian cheese industry. It has brought great commercial savings to cheesemaking world wide and Australian contributions have been significant.
In 1949 Kraft began work on rindless cheese. This was an American development in which cheese curd was 'hooped' in rectangular stainless steel moulds and, when pressed, sealed in a flexible plastic film impervious to water vapour. The result was a rindless cheese which could be cut into retail units for wrapping separately. The economic gain by preventing rind formation was considerable.
The first product went on the market in Cry-O-Vac bags in 1951, but the more sophisticated rindless cheese wrapped in a different film followed within a year or two and in 1957 Kraft installed a roll-stock machine to package 8 oz. blocks of un-processed ('natural') cheese. The exclusion of oxygen, which is essential if the product is to remain mould-free, depends on the effectiveness of the seal and the resistance of the film to pinholing during transport and storage. The technology was American and appropriate specifications were supplied from America, but a great deal of work was necessary by Australian Kraft packaging technologists to modify them for Australian conditions and then, at the beginning, to assist local manufacturers of the film to make it. In 1958 CSIRO began a programme of work to develop rindless cheese for other manufacturers and this technology is now used generally in Australia.[192] It is derived but it includes a considerable amount of Australian innovation.
Until the 1950s Australian made cheese was Cheddar. In the late thirties Kraft made a small amount of Swiss cheese in the traditional 'wheels'. It was used for Processed Gruyere but manufacture ceased on the outbreak of war. In 1955 this company began to manufacture Swiss in rectangular blocks using American technology which had to be modified to some extent because of some fundamentally different properties of Australian milks. The blocks were plastic wrapped and hence rindless. Other varieties of cheese followed and other smaller companies began to produce national cheeses, especially Italian varieties. Other cheesemakers from Europe entered the industry and by the 1980s many different types of cheese were being made with greater or lesser success, sometimes in quite small quantities.
Organisations in Australian Science at Work - CSIRO; CSIRO Dairy Research Section; James Bell Machinery Co.; Kraft Foods Limited
People in Bright Sparcs - Czulak, J.; Daniell, F. H.; Sharkey, J. E.
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Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering |  |
© 1988 Print Edition pages 135 - 136, Online Edition 2000
Published by Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher
http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/137.html