Behind the Cheese
The lifecycle of vegan cheese is a little different to its dairy counterpart.
The first step? Choosing which cheese to veganise!
Our first product, launched in New Zealand 2014, was a vegan mozzarella alternative. A large part of the reason for choosing that type of cheese was that Hell Pizza wanted a locally-made plant-based cheese to put on their menu for their vegan and dairy-free customers. Once that product was established, we gradually developed plant-based versions of other dairy cheeses which we believed there would be demand for.
In the early days we went mostly by gut feeling as to which products would be most popular.
We do get customers begging us to make vegan halloumi, vegan camembert or vegan gruyere. The market for plant-based cheese has grown hugely in the last few years but it’s still a niche market. Plant-based versions of specialty cheeses are a niche within a niche and we have to be somewhat hard-hearted about it - our main sales channel is mainstream retailers, and they simply aren’t ready to give vegan cheese heaps of shelf space yet.
These days, as a more grown-up business, we have a formal process for deciding which NPD - new product development - projects to work on next. It’s a combination of anticipated demand, existing competition, the level of difficulty to develop and to manufacture.
Once we’ve decided which product to work on next, our Technical Manager works on the formulation. Often this is based on the recipes for our existing products, but with adjustments to ingredients and specific processes.
Our Technical Manager gets feedback from the team during the development process - we assess taste, texture, aroma, colour and performance. Once we have a result we’re all happy with (which takes months of work!) we seek feedback from outside the team to confirm it’s as good as we think it is.
The next phase is for our manufacturer to do a trial production run of about 500kg, to confirm that the recipe produces the right result when scaled up massively from the bench trial volumes of up to 1kg.
Seeing the product at its first production is exciting and a little scary, because there are no guarantees it will be successful - although we do everything we can to make success more likely than failure.
The main ingredients for most of our products are various starches (which have been processed by specialty ingredients companies to produce very specific qualities which enable us to get as close as possible to replicating dairy cheese from purely plant-based ingredients) and coconut oil.
The ingredients are cooked like a sauce in big vessels to activate the gelling properties of the starches and to pasteurise the product. The liquid cheese is then filled while still hot into containers - for our block products, those containers are exactly what you see on the supermarket shelf. The lids go on while the product is still hot - this, combined with the minimal handling of the product, means excellent food safety and great shelf-life. It also means reduced food waste, which is also very important to us.
