Melhorias e inovação na queijaria da Aveleda

Abstract

Innovation and a continuous improvement contribute to the growth of companies in the industrial sector. The enormous competitiveness installed in the industrial world, with no exception of the dairy sector, leads companies to try daily to win new consumers, improve their production techniques and increase profitability. Queijaria da Aveleda, Lda. recognizes the importance of innovating and improving the techniques used, giving importance to studies such as those carried out in this work. With the objective of innovation, we started by improving the execution of the "Block Cut" technique. When an axle was inserted in the guillotine used for this technique, the manipulator was able to standardize the weights of the cheeses resulting from the cut by resorting to the numbered axis to perform the task. Later, to confirm an improvement already implemented in Queijaria da Aveleda, the maximum capacity of the curing chambers with superimposed food aptitude grids was calculated, and then comparing with the maximum capacity of the chambers with stainless steel shelves. The results showed a 36% increase in capacity and, thus, Queijaria da Aveleda does not need to invest, for now, in the construction of a new cure chamber. Two new cheeses have been developed and will be marketed at Queijaria da Aveleda. We are mentioning two cheese of nominal mass of 0,4 kg, one with crushed “salpicão” and the other with pieces of olive and oregano. Both the formulation, production and adjustment of quantities were performed at this stage revealing positive sensory results. A "day-job" was built in order to organize tasks in production and finishing stage. After observing the feasibility of “day-job”, the standard production of productivity was calculated for three quantities of milk (3000, 6000 and 9000 liters). The standard productivity resulted in a decrease as the amount of milk used increases, as expected. It is also possible to conclude that the standard cheese productivity is always higher in the production of small cheese than in the large cheese. A monitoring study of weight loss of cheeses during maturation was carried out, concluding that there would be no differences between a bunch with a fixed weight or with a random weight, which would suggest that the installation of an automated equipment would help to standardize weights during this process. In order to know the size of the financial losses, we used data from the year 2017 and the average weight loss during the maturation of the previous study, estimating a loss of 180 880 € in this year, during this period process. Since it is important to reduce weight losses during the maturation process, a study was carried out based on the application of a film, Breska. The results obtained were not as expected. The application of the film did not result in a reduction of weight loss during the maturation process, showing the need to study new methods.

Date of Award	3 Dec 2018
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Carlos André Pinheiro Oliveira (Supervisor)