Don't say 'cheese' to these Fonterra workers

Tasters (left to right) Marilyn Ferguson, Alison Cradock and Wendy Longstaff at the Waitoa factory. Picture / Dean Purcell

Cheese is probably the last thing members of the tasting team at Waitoa dairy factory feel like eating after a day's work.

"Don't eat much cheese at home - none of us do. No cheese sandwiches anyway and if we buy lunch we avoid anything with cheese," said team leader Alison Cradock, although she admitted to nibbling more exotic blues and bries at home.

But, on the job, enthusiasm for cheese is a must.

After all, the team is on the front line of ensuring that the 20kg blocks of Cheddar, colby, Egmont, Edam and Gouda produced at Fonterra's factory at Waitoa and several others nearby in the Waikato are up to scratch.

Specifications of the cheeses made by New Zealand's largest company have to match what customers want.

Trainee testers learn how to identify different tastes and textures and associate them with various scores.

"It takes about six months before people start to feel confident tasting cheese," said cheese sensory coordinator Wendy Longstaff, who has been tasting for 12 years. She said the teams work closely with Fonterra Innovation in Palmerston North to develop testing for any new cheeses.

Besides taste and texture, the team also test cheeses for qualities such as how they melt or what colour it turns when baked. Blocks may be sliced open to check if there are too many holes in them.

The tasting itself - which takes up to two and a half hours a day - involves sampling cigar-sized plugs of cheese from up to 160 blocks.

Like wine tasters, team members don't actually swallow the cheese but spit it out into cups.

Even so, they do end up taking down fat and Fonterra monitors them to make sure this doesn't lead to health problems. "We have a cholesterol test once a year to help keep us healthy," said Cradock, who has been working in "sensory" for three years.

Testers work together to score the different cheeses for qualities including firmness, smoothness, salt acid taste and bitterness. The youngest cheeses the team tastes are two weeks old, the oldest up to three years.