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The Client

Laticínios Tirol is a large dairy company from the Santa Catarina region in the South of Brazil, producing a range of milk, cheese, yoghurt and other and dairy products. They had been undergoing rapid expansion in their product range and increasing production volumes due to growing demand from the local market.

Founded in the Austrian settlement of Treze Tílias, Tirol has a strong Austrian influence and is renowned for producing traditional Austrian dairy products such as prato cheese.

The Challenge

Tirol chilled their cheese in cool store rooms, a process which took five to seven days.

Changes in their production methods, however, meant that the prato cheese began to develop a bitter flavour which resulted in complaints from consumers. To address this, they required a quicker chilling solution to rein in the bacteria levels and produce a milder flavoured cheese.

Tirol approached MHM to discuss a dairy chilling tunnel to rapidly chill their prato cheese. We took them to visit one of our tunnel installations in the USA; they were impressed with what they saw and engaged us to deliver the same for them.

Our Solution

MHM custom designed, manufactured and installed a MHM Cheese Cooling Tunnel for Tirol.

We worked closely with the client to meet their specific requirements, which included working within the limited space of their existing cool store and the transport of the cheese blocks in plastic crates rather than cartons.

The tunnel was designed to cool 2,400 20 kilogram blocks of prato cheese from 36°C to 12°C in 24 hours. This specification was developed with future capacity growth in mind; while the current throughput at the plant is two blocks per minute, the tunnel is capable of handling up to eight blocks per minute.

As well as chilling the product, the tunnel provides significant enhancements to the materials handling process. Product is automatically loaded in the tunnel via conveyors, whereas previously it had to be manually transported and stacked in the cool store room.

The Result

The tunnel was commissioned in February 2015 and is running well, chilling approximately 48 tonnes of cheese per day. Feedback from the client has been positive, with their quality control team reporting a significant decrease in customer complaints about bitterness in the cheese.