Businessweek: These Cheese Scientists Are Fighting to Save the Dairy Industry

Some choice quotes from the article:

• “Americans eat 35 pounds of cheese per year on average”
• “The cheese glut is so massive (1.3 billion pounds in cold storage as of May 31) that on two separate occasions, in August and October of last year, the federal government announced it would bail out dairy farmers by purchasing $20 million worth of surplus for distribution to food pantries.”
• “With an entire ounce in the shell, the Quesalupa has about five times the cheese load of a basic Crunchy Taco. To produce the shells alone, Taco Bell had to buy 4.7 million pounds of cheese.”
• “How to mass-produce the shells became McClintock’s problem. She applied her doctorate in chemistry to the cheese filling, comparing various varieties’ chemical compositions, specifically the interplay between molecules of a protein called casein found in the space around milk fat.”
• “The final products were pre-assembled in factories using the Press, a proprietary machine Bloomberg wasn’t allowed to see.”

From Businessweek, “These Cheese Scientists Are Fighting to Save the Dairy Industry”

• Aside