MYCOFORTI™ CHEESE CULTURES

The uniqueness of our new Penicillium roqueforti strains designed for blue cheese is evident. They have been meticulously bred from carefully chosen strains, and we have rigorously evaluated their performance in both laboratory settings and cheese production environments. Moreover, we have sought feedback from consumers, conducting thorough assessments to ensure that only the strains exhibiting the desired characteristics of cheese taste and texture, while avoiding the customary bitter notes often linked to blue cheese cultures, have been selected. Throughout this process, we have maintained close collaboration with the Dairy industry, resulting in the development of our initial commercial strains that effectively meet the requirements of customers and consumers.

We have used natural breeding techniques to sexually cross current Penicillium roqueforti cheese production strains. We then select from the resulting offspring those with particularly favourable characteristics. Our techniques are similar to those that have been used for centuries in traditional plant breeding. This is the first time this approach has been used with Penicillium roqueforti. We have specialist know-how to breed and select new favourable strains

The strains of Penicillium roqueforti sold today were chosen for their performance in dairy products; we are working on breeding a new selection of strains designed to work to the same levels of performance in plant-based dairy. These we hope will be available towards the end of 2023.

Our cultures are grown on gluten free media so we can guarantee they are gluten free.

Our cultures are all new single strain cultures, which means that they have a predictable performance. Our cultures are currently manufactured in Europe to the internationally recognised BRC (FSC 22000) standard; which means they can be confidently used by manufacturers. The product is sold in 50ml bottles, at spore concentration levels matching those of the current market leaders. We believe in having a dialogue with our customers so if you need our products in different formats, such as freeze-dried inoculum, we are open to a commercial discussion to make it happen. Each production batch is grown from our mother stock ensuring consistency and tested by an independent laboratory.

All strains including the ones you use today can produce mycotoxins given the right growth conditions. Safety is our absolute priority; we have a stringent approach. Our first step is to test and screen all our strains for mycotoxin production. We only select strains that produce mycotoxin levels equivalent or below the current strains sold in the market today.

Our strains are not genetically modified and are created through breeding; which means they are naturally produced cultures.

We know that introducing something new into a dairy or any manufacturing environment is a risk. So we have taken strenuous efforts to demonstrate that our cultures won’t cause you an issue. How have we done this? We have done laboratory tests to look at how our strain competes directly with the leading competitor strains and shown that our strains do not outcompete other strains. We have also introduced our strains into many dairies without any issues.

We have produced some exclusive strains for our development partners. Similar production of bespoke strains can be undertaken on request, but as a start-up would need to be funded by the production partner.

We feel that by being close to our customers we can provide both micro support services and also technical support to you to get the best out of our strains. We can also support you with any fungal issues you may encounter, including routine environmental sampling.

In the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland our strains are only available from JKM Food Ltd (sales@jkm-foods.com) for commercial customers. If you are a home hobbyist we are planning to make our strains available through established online outlets in the near future.