DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences (N&B) has launched Choozit BC 02, a new phage alternative for cheese makers in the pizza category. The ingredient, designed for ideal pizza cheese browning, joins Choozit BC 01 as a proprietary formulation within the DuPont Danisco portfolio of ingredients. Marketed as a clean label solution, these 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.

“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 yield and mineralization of the cheese,” says Annie Mornet, Global Product Manager, Cheese Cultures at DuPont N&B.

The launch builds on the success of Choozit BC 01, which was launched last year. “Pizza cheese makers have confirmed that Choozit BC 01 gives much better browning control for the same cheese quality, and for some particular pizza cheese manufacturing processes manufacturers have been able to use 25 percent less water in the pizza cheese process,” continues Mornet. 

“The metabolism of the different species allows for a better consumption of the sugars, especially galactose, throughout the process. Moreover, Choozit BC 01 and 02 are a biodiverse and alternative formulation leading to a higher robustness and limiting the phages issues,” she adds.

Achieving consumers’ preferred cheese browning color using only natural solutions is noted by the supplier as a key challenge for many pizza manufacturers. Last year’s rollout of Choozit BC 01 in the European market is dubbed significant progress by DuPont N&B. Aside from using less water in its clean label production, Choozit BC helps pizza cheese makers lower their required volume of whey and consume less energy for whey drying.

A major hurdle that remains for makers of factory-made pizza cheese is the need for consistency and productivity. To date, Choozit BC 01 is in commercial use and in approval phases in key countries around the broader European region, DuPont N&B highlights. These countries represent roughly 77 percent of the total pizza cheese produced in Europe, it further notes.

Choozit BC was recognized at the Fi Innovation Awards, organized as part of the Fi Europe 2019 trade show in Paris, France. At the event, companies were recognized for their solutions in the spaces of clean label, diversity, innovative food tech, nutrition, functionality, plant-based and disruptive potential.

In the US last year, DuPont debuted its range of Choozit SWIFT 600 cultures for “fast-making pizza cheese, day after day.” The company also debuted its Choozit AMERI-FLEX cultures, for “American-style” cheese, created to improve processing consistency, increasing yield in high moisture cheese and enabling formulators to produce different types of American cheese using the same equipment.