Celebrating 20 Years in Food Protection
Before the clean label movement gained momentum in the late 1990s, dairies and food manufacturers were mainly relying on chemical alternatives to cope with food spoilage issues or simply accepting limited shelf life. At the time, momentum was building among consumers for cleaner, more natural ingredients as they gained more interest in the food ingredients they were ingesting.
Into this changing market, DuPont Nutrition & Health introduced HOLDBAC® YM Protective Cultures – a solution that naturally maintains the taste and quality of yogurts, cheese and other fresh fermented foods throughout shelf life, while also delivering flexibility to customers’ production processes.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of HOLDBAC® YM (yeast and mold) Protective Cultures. Since their invention, HOLDBAC® YM Protective Cultures have become a brand name synonymous with dairy spoilage prevention around the world and has helped establish DuPont Nutrition & Health as a global leader in clean-label food protection solutions. Inherently developed as label-friendly solutions, HOLDBAC® YM cultures allow the ability to formulate longer shelf life, fermented dairy products while preserving taste – without using a synthetic preservative like sorbate.
What began as a single product in 1998 has since expanded into five generations of cultures that are used in applications from yogurts to much more diverse dairy foods, like cheeses and butter spreads, each allowing DuPont scientists to tailor them to specific customer needs.
“The invention of HOLDBAC® cultures was a breakthrough, positioning DuPont as one of the first to bring about dramatic improvements in eliminating spoilage and waste, not only during manufacturing, but also in the retail and consumer environments,” said Malene Svejstrup, senior application scientist. “Our newest version of HOLDBAC® YM-XP Protective cultures exemplify how we can work with customers to develop expert options against the specific spoilage issues their products face.
“These cultures are designed to provide optimum protection against yeast and mold, specifically in the mild acidic pH conditions typical in cheese and mild yogurt. HOLDBAC® YM-XP cultures can help keep the naturalness of our customers’ products and maintain taste throughout shelf-life or extending shelf-life, for example to facilitate exportation, therefore preventing product waste and significantly impacting the bottom line.”
DuPont recently teamed with a dairy manufacturer and offered an innovative way of applying HOLBAC® YM Protective Cultures for a new clean label formula without potassium sorbate preservatives. This enabled the customer to be a first-mover on the market with an all-natural solution. The customer, who also tested other available cultures, found that this new HOLDBAC® YM product matched the preservation ability of sorbate in their product – and did so as a natural, clean label solution with additional positive contribution to flavor and consistency.
“In addition, for productivity and sustainability focused customers, shelf life is a key parameter to reducing food waste and addressing consumer preference over an extended time. One of our priorities is to use specific dairy cultures such as HOLDBAC® to efficiently reduce food waste by increasing the shelf life of dairy products while preserving taste. Furthermore, it enables manufacturers to export and satisfy a growing number of customers longer.”
Given its connection to extending shelf life, HOLDBAC® Protective Cultures are among a wide range of DuPont™ Danisco® ingredients that support the United Nation’s Global Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses” by 2030. More than 30 percent of all food is lost or wasted in the value chain. A study conducted by DuPont shows that HOLDBAC® protective cultures, if applied to white cheese on a global scale, can reduce waste by 50-60 percent, saving more than 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e). This is the same as taking 170,000 average EU cars off the road for a year. In other words, HOLDBAC® provides an all-natural and sustainable solution alternative to chemical preservatives.
