SMART-RIPE · New ripening room monitoring technology for improving the efficiency and sustainability of cheese ripening processes

The SMARTRIPE project will help SMEs from the cheese-making and equipment supply chain to exploit the results of the FP6 TRUEFOOD project, which focused on the introduction of new technologies for the elaboration of European Traditional Food Products, and covered a large range of activities, from consumer behaviour to food safety and nutritional impact. The improvement of ripening of traditional cheeses, involving microbial and processing approaches, was among the most significant results of TRUEFOOD. New control strategies of ripening rooms monitoring were studied, involving their sequential ventilation in order to reduce energy consumption.In the SMARTRIPE project, access will be provided to the TRUEFOOD results to enable prototype systems to be built based on an innovative combination of sensor technology and control software, with the aim of validating and demonstrating the concept of “sequential ventilation” of ripening rooms in order to save energy (around 50% of electrical consumption necessary for ripening room ventilation) and to control cheese mass loss (cheese water evaporation) versus ripening time targeting pre-defined final cheese weights.Effective knowledge management and protection procedures will be put in place to pave the way forward for the commercial exploitation of the results, which will be planned out by the participating SME in a business plan. The uptake of the SMARTRIPE technology in the marketplace will result in competitive benefits for traditional cheese-making SME in terms of reduced costs and improved yields. On the supply side, the SME who will commercialise SMARTRIPE in the European cheese-making market will enjoy a highly lucrative business opportunity by being able to supply the market with a scientifically validated technology that offers Unique Selling Points and a demonstrable Return-on-Investment. Moreover, the environmental, social and economic impacts are expected to be high and will be assessed during the project.