Rendimento e qualidade do processo de produção da manteiga

Abstract

Growing competitiveness and rising consumption levels in the food industry demand ever more differentiation. At the same time, quality standards and legal restrictions are competing with increased production capacity, limiting constant rates of variability and non-conformity. It has therefore become imperative to monitor and optimise the factors involved in your process. To maximise the reliability and efficiency of complex industrial production systems such as food products, management decisions depend on the experience of the manager and the organisation. The task of operators is therefore to know the components, variables, stages and operating times to increase the reliability and efficiency of production processes. To understand what influenced the final quality of the butter, the company Lactogal S.A., the site of the internship, adopted measures to test which variables condition the butter production process (rancidity) and which factors can condition its final yield. To this end, two studies were carried out to understand the factors that influence the quality and yield of butter under realistic market conditions. The first study explores the impact of different storage and packaging conditions on butter quality. Through a systematic analysis, butter stored in paper packaging was found to have significantly higher levels of rancidity than butter stored in plastic packaging. The second study was carried out to study how variables such as type of butter, %fat of cream and crystallisation time influence the final yield of the butter production process. It was also found that the accumulation of stocks of raw materials from other plants affected the quality of the cream and its production process. In conclusion, we studied the factors that influence butter rancidity and the optimum conditions for the butter production process, to achieve maximum yield and higher product quality.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2024
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria João Nepomuceno P. Monteiro Palermo de Faria (Supervisor)