DuPont introduces Choozit BC 02 for pizza cheesemakers

DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences announced the launch of Choozit BC 02, a new phage alternative for cheesemakers 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 cheesemakers in creating added value and flexibility for their foodservice customers – enabling them to achieve a consistent quality pizza cheese in a wide range of ovens around the world, day after day.

A new phage alternative for cheesemakers

According to the press statement, 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 formulated with additives. Choozit BC helps pizza cheesemakers meet consumer preferences for natural products while using less water in production, a lower volume of whey, and less energy for whey drying.

Pizza cheesemakers 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. According to DuPont internal data, these countries represent roughly 77% of the total pizza cheese produced in Europe.

“As demand rises across the global pizza industry, pizza cheesemakers have looked for solutions to make a 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 cheesemakers have confirmed that Choozit BC 01 gives much better browning control for the same cheese quality. 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 cheese’s yield and mineralization. The metabolism of the different species allows for better consumption of the sugars, especially galactose, throughout the process. Moreover, Choozit BC 01 and 02 are a biodiverse and alternative formulation leading to higher robustness and limiting the phages’ issues.”