Tetra Alcross Bactocatch

Some bacteria and spores in milk are able to survive a normal pasteurization and can create problems in the cheese making process. The growth of unwanted bacteria and spores in the cheese can spoil the cheese by a late blowing of the cheese during ripening.

This is especially true in the semi hard and hard cheese types where a combination of high moisture, low salt content and elevated ripening temperatures provide an environment that allows these spores to develop and generate gas.

The Tetra Alcross Bactocatch plant is designed to eliminate the risk of a late blowing of cheeses without having to add a chemical inhibitor to the cheese milk.

The Tetra Alcross Bactocatch system is an integrated solution that uses a combination of microfiltration and heat treatment to eliminate the risk of spoilage by removing the bacteria and spores from the milk.

In a cheese processing line the Tetra Alcross Bactocatch will be installed right after the separator. The skim milk coming from the separator will be treated in the microfiltration part of the system. In this section the skim milk will be separated into 2 streams, permeate and retentate. The permeate is the milk that passes through the membranes and in this stream the bacteria and spore content has be reduced by 99,5%. The retentate will contain all the bacteria and spores from the skim milk because these are too large to be able to pass through the membranes.

The retentate will be mixed with the cream coming from the separator and be heat treated at 248 – 266 F for a few seconds. This is an effective treatment to eliminate the bacteria and spores in this stream.

After the heat treatment the cream and retentate mix is blended back into the permeate stream and the standardized cheese milk is feed to a normal cheese milk pasteurizer before is goes to the cheese vats.