Challenges of cheese

January 18, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

Manufacturing vegan cheese is a highly technical challenge. The cooked mixture needs to be flowable when hot (so it doesn’t block the pipes of the processing equipment). After cooking, it needs to set firm enough to slice and grate and – most challenging of all – it needs to melt in the customer’s oven, whether that’s a commercial oven in a pizzeria or a benchtop toaster oven in a student flat. All these functions rely on very specific gel structures, which are difficult to achieve in a product that is also pleasant to eat. Today the global market for cheese analogues has grown so much that there is a wide variety of specialised ingredients available to food manufacturers – it’s still a difficult technical challenge, but far more achievable than it was back in 2014.

Hell Pizza helped greatly by allowing us to test several iterations at one of their stores, to test how it would perform in a commercial pizza oven. Eventually, we had a recipe we were happy with on a small scale, so we took the gamble of importing a particular specialty starch it required. The minimum order quantity was a tonne, which was rather daunting. The supplier kindly agreed that we didn't have to pay for it all upfront, but rather could draw down on it as we needed it over 12 months.

In January 2014 we took the big step of doing a production trial at the recently established FoodBowl: a government-supported, pilot-scale production facility near Auckland Airport, where manufacturers can test new formulations or processes. We went in with high hopes and emerged exhausted after a disastrous trial. The cooking vessel wasn’t suitable and nor was the formulation: the vessel’s pipes got blocked up with setting cheese, taking the staff hours to clean out. We were grateful for Jan's significant height: he feverishly stirred the mix with a giant wooden paddle to try and stop it from sticking to the vessel’s heated sides. Our packaging was cardboard trays with a special non-stick and non-absorbent coating. We wanted to film seal and vacuum pack the trays while the product was still hot, to give us the longest possible shelf-life. But when a vacuum was applied to the trays of hot cheese it boiled up, making it almost impossible to apply the film. What should have been six hours' work for me, Colin, Jan and the FoodBowl team took almost 12 hours and we had no product to show for it. But we applied what we'd learned and returned a month later for a more successful trial. Now we were ready to start working with a contract manufacturer and our first commercial batch (just 282 units) was made in June 2014.

It was the first dairy-free cheese to be commercially manufactured in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it was a turning point for the business. Over the next decade, we would multiply our turnover by 10 times and move from a micro-niche brand supplying specialty stores to a mainstream niche brand stocked in most supermarkets in Aotearoa New Zealand. It also meant another steep learning curve: organic stores and other independents are relatively easy-going and accustomed to working with small businesses that are driven by passion more than business experience. Even so, the more helpful a supplier can be to those independents the better: I remember an organic store manager pointing out to me that Angel Food was just one of more than 300 suppliers she dealt with regularly. Although the independent stores were generally very pleasant to deal with, we needed to get into supermarkets to have our desired impact, because most people do most of their shopping at supermarkets. We had supplied the imported products to a few New World stores (they operated much more independently back then) and were able to immediately start supplying them with our locally-made product. And then, within a year, I had a call from a Countdown (now rebranded as Woolworths) buyer enquiring about stocking our products nationwide. Growing from a boutique supplier to a small supplier was exciting and often painful. Finding good service providers who will take on tiny companies at an affordable price can be very hard, because the established ones naturally prefer to take on companies with big volumes.

WHAT IS VEGAN CHEESE?

There are currently two main types of vegan cheese: products intended for everyday eating - like Angel Food’s range - are made from a very precise combination of starches and vegetable oils. The starches can be from various vegetable ingredients such as corn, potato, pea or tapioca. They’re not the same as the corn starch or wheat starch you might buy at the supermarket (this is known as ‘native’ starch) - these ingredients are processed in very precise ways so that they perform certain functions. They’re known as modified starches, but that refers to the processing, it doesn’t mean they are genetically modified.

It is not easy making a replica of a dairy product without using any dairy ingredients, or any other animal ingredients. The casein in dairy milk is particularly challenging to replace. Casein is the milk protein that delivers the stretch in dairy cheese. There are various companies around the world - including in Aotearoa New Zealand - which are working on creating animal-free casein to make plant-based cheeses more authentic. At the time of writing, these products are not yet available on the market.

There are also gourmet or artisan vegan cheeses that are based on nuts or seeds. These products are cultured and fermented, in a similar way to artisan dairy cheeses.

None of these vegan cheeses taste exactly like dairy cheese, but unlike dairy cheese which people have been making for thousands of years, this is a very new field of endeavour. Every year new techniques and new ingredients are discovered, and every year vegan cheeses take another delicious step forward.