The Kasanova and his mobile cheese dairy

Mini pellet heating for fantastic culinary delights. Benjamin Schmidhofer is one of the youngest and most innovative cheese masters in Austria. Several medals at the international cheese Olympics confirm his skills.

The founder of the Kasanova fine cheese factory demonstrated his creativity by setting up a mobile cheese factory, which consists only of a truck with a refrigerated container. The Kasanova drives directly to the farmers, transports their milk from the farm tank to the cheese vat and processes it directly on site. Through a glass hygiene lock, each farmer can follow the entire process, which takes around four hours, and inspect his fresh cheese wheels at the end. Of course, it takes more time until it is fully ripened, and each wheel requires intensive care. “The ‘greasing, cleaning and storing’ takes place in my cheese cellar until the end of the ripening process, where I personally look after each of my round charges,” reports Benjamin.

“Building a cheese factory that fits into a refrigerated container, including the energy supply, was a big challenge,” reveals the Kasanova. “For reasons of sustainability, biomass was the only energy source we considered from the start. A milk quantity of up to 500 kg must be heated from 10°C up to 85°C within half an hour. This would require an output of around 80 kW. However, a boiler of this size, including peripherals, would have taken up too much space for the cheese boilers. So, we decided to install a 1000-liter buffer tank in conjunction with a 22 kW pellet boiler.”

Due to its special design, the boiler requires very little space and has condensing technology, which, in conjunction with the buffer storage, significantly increases efficiency. The boiler includes the control for two mixing circuits for the two cheese boilers, which can be operated at different temperatures, and the control of the freshwater module for domestic water preparation. A grid-independent power supply system even makes it possible to preheat the buffer during the journey, so that heating up the milk can begin immediately after arriving at the customer’s premises. The buffer volume of 1000 liters allows the amount of 500 liters of milk to be heated twice. During further processing, the pellet boiler has time to preheat the buffer again. Despite the low output of 22 kW, the cheese dairy is supplied with enough heating energy and can be operated efficiently.

“There is no cheese dairy like this anywhere on earth,” Schmidhofer is convinced. “We are completely self-sufficient, environmentally friendly and CO2-neutral. We show appreciation to the farmers and also create a circular economy.”