Quantifying energy savings during cheese ripening after implementation of sequential air ventilation in an industrial cheesemaking plant

The main objective of this work was to determine the highest energy savings that could be made by implementing sequential air ventilation strategy in an industrial large-scale ripening room, without affecting the final cheese quality. Six ripening trials were run corresponding to different ventilation strategies: continuous air ventilation taken as reference, time-based sequential air ventilation, and temperature-based sequential air ventilation. The results showed that ripening caused substantial cheese respiratory activity that was not significantly affected by either continuous or sequential room ventilation. It was also shown that sequential ventilation had no significant effect on the evolution of cheese ripening microbial flora, biochemical characteristics, or appearance, and thus on the final cheese quality. In the conditions of this study, a specific energy consumption of 3.6 MJ per kg of cheese was estimated, and for the ripening room investigated, mean electrical energy savings ranged from 41 kWh per day to 170 kWh per day, depending on the strategy implemented. Industrial operators could usefully study how to generalize these results to the ripening rooms used in cheese production worldwide.