Designing of processed cheese products taking into account quality indicators and cost of raw materials

Background. Processed cheeses and processed cheese products are products that often contain non-dairy raw materials. However, the vast majority of research is aimed exclusively at studying the effects of these raw materials on quality and nutritional value, but the cost of finished products is not taken into account. Given this, it is important to search for recipes for processed cheese products using non-dairy raw materials which will achieve the minimum cost of production considering the optimal values of rheological parameters and organoleptic characteristics. Materials and methods. To optimize the recipe of processed cheese products, we used an experiment planning for a linear dependence model with two active factors (mass fraction of a mixture of palm oil and hemp oil and mass fraction of a mixture of oat flour and rice flour) and two output parameters (shear stress limit and organoleptic characteristics) followed by a search for the recipe of the processed cheese product of the minimum cost and acceptable quality. Results. The linear models obtained from the results of the planning of the experiment allow the influence of the amount of oil mixture (palm oil and hemp oil in the ratio 84.1:15.9) and of the (Bolgova depends on the amount and ratio of the non-dairy raw materials used. The processed cheese product which contains 11.32% oil mixture and 2.45% flour mixture is characterized by having the minimum cost, optimal value of shear stress limit, high organoleptic properties, and physicochemical parameters within established norms. The proposed approach to the designing of the recipe, taking into account its cost, can be used in the manufacturing of processed cheese products using other non-dairy raw materials.