Page 18 - Food & Drink Magazine October 2019

DAIRY PROCESSING
In the raw, Australia’s first raw milk
Entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity have seen Australia’s – in fact the world’s – first cold pressed raw milk come onto the market. Kim Berry spoke with Wade Porter, CEO of the company behind the breakthrough, Made By Cow.
USING a top secret, patented method and milk from a single Jersey herd on the New South Wales south coast, Australian company Made By Cow has launched the world’s first cold pressed raw milk.
In Australia it is illegal to sell untreated or “raw” milk. It has had to undergo pasteurisation where it is heated to at least 72 degrees to destroy any harmful bacteria. A fact which lends itself to the question, how is Made By Cow selling raw milk.
Its patented process uses a cold high-pressure process (HPP) and is the first of its kind approved by the New South Wales Food Authority for milk.
At the brand’s official launch in August, CEO Wade Porter told Food & Drink Business that it was “game changer” for the dairy industry and that the company was a “market mover”.
At the launch, co-founder Saxon Joye said the development process and gaining Food Authority approval had been “long and exhaustive”.
It took 18 months to two years of testing to work out a ‘recipe’ that would deliver a reduction
in the five pathogens present in raw milk. The Food Authority ran a 12-week testing schedule to prove the process worked.
Porter says: “The milk is shipped straight from the farm to our processing plant. It’s then immediately bottled and put through the HPP.”
The fact that the milk is not exposed during that process, combined with careful herd management and more hygienic milking practices means the milk is “safe, unaltered, deliciously creamy”.
The pressure destroys harmful pathogens but has no impact on nutritionally valuable smaller molecules like vitamins and enzymes. It also extends shelf life to six weeks.
“The Food Authority tested the raw milk and then our cold HPP milk. We were able to determine that for the first time outside of heat pasteurisation we could deliver an alternative compliance, which is a world first,” Porter says.
The innovation came from an entrepreneurial mindset, which Porter sees as the best position to be in.
“It was a time when creative minds took a step back, looked at other industries, asked ‘how can we apply this technology to deliver a real health outcome?’ and then applied their knowledge,” he says.
BEST PRACTICE, FUNCTIONAL BRAND
While milk will always be the halo brand for the business,
the company sees “huge” opportunity to be a functional dairy brand. It is already making kefir; a triple cream brie will hopefully be launched before the end of the year; and it is also looking into ice cream.
“So long as it can be done using cold processing, so no heating above 50 degrees, we will explore the possibilities,” Porter says.
“The dairy industry is very conservative, and it needs to be, but at the same time we feel like we’re representing the industry as well. By that I mean, we want to deliver on what we’ve done. That’s why we single batch test every milk delivery that comes in, which is a really stringent standard.
18 | Food&Drink business | October 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au