Membrane Technology [199]

The waste of good food through the dumping of whey has always been a reproach to the dairy industry. With an increasing public awareness of the polluting effects of whey it became more than a reproach and about 1970 L. L. Muller of CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratory initiated a whey utilization project and encouraged dairy companies to support it. He was successful also in persuading the CSIRO Division of Chemical Engineering and the Victorian Department of Agriculture to collaborate with his laboratory and ultimately in joining the forces of the Australian group with similar groups in New Zealand and Ireland. Out of this collaboration came much information concerning the application of the membrane processes of reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration to the problem of using whey as a source material for the manufacture of a number of useful products. Many people overseas were working on the problems of membrane design, manufacture and sanitation but the work of the Australian group and its collaborators was complementary and contributed to the overall solution of a number of problems. Aided by the CSIRO team several Australian companies have installed membrane plants which are now in operation making feta cheese and concentrating whey for the manufacture of spray dried whey protein concentrate.

Other Dairy Products

From 1960 the CSIRO Division of Dairy Research made a concerted attempt to develop new dairy foods. It was successful to some extent but few of them, and those mostly ingredients rather than retail items, were accepted by the industry. Two later projects may be mentioned, one successful, the other not. The successful one was the Australian milk biscuit, a high protein product which was developed in collaboration with the biscuit manufacturer, Brockhoffs.[201] It has since been used in a number of feeding programmes in developing countries especially Zambia. The other was the production of polyunsaturated dairy products by feeding cattle with special supplements in such a way as to by-pass the rumen and thus to modify the butterfat produced by the animal.[202] It was an ingenious piece of biology and biochemistry but the products were too expensive and it seemed to some at the time that many equally satisfactory products could have been made from skim milk and vegetable oils, regulations permitting. Highly successful commercially and a technology come to stay has been the introduction by industry of fermented milk products, specifically, yogurt.

Dairy Factory Amalgamation

By 1970 the number of dairy factories in Australia had fallen to half those operating in 1946, and there has been further centralization since then. There were three major reasons for this. The first was the bulk tanker collection of farm-refrigerated milk, which greatly extended the radius of the area from which milk could be drawn for one factory. The second was the new technology, with its swing away from butter to the production of a number of products in diversified capital intensive factories: continuous production, better quality control, better marketing, better cash flows, qualified laboratory staff, all leading to economies of scale. The third was managerial flair and financial innovation, which in the co-operative movement generated capital for the modernization and rebuilding of factories. All these things revolutionized the manufacture of milk products but the scientific and technological base on which they rested is obvious.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering