Wait, what's the "technology" that's being talked about in this cheese? Isn't it just normal cheese? Am I missing something here or is this artificial faux cheese?
Cheese production doesn't lack technology just because it's a familiar product. There are hundreds if not thousands of types of cheese. What distinguishes them is partly the dairy origin, but also largely the techniques used to produce them. Just looking at mozzarella, there are hundreds of different mozzarella cheeses on the market. They are not identical. Being able to consistently produce a mozzarella that has certain attributes requires tight control of a process that starts with an inconsistent output. What temperature do you process at? When does it change? When do you add rennet? How do you separate whey from the curds? How long do you age? etc. All of this is tech.
I've worked in similar industrial facilities - it's easy to get things right until you don't.
It really takes someone that knows their shit when a single ingredient has changed ever so slightly and the final result isn't quite right, the heat patterns and cycles of the ovens, changes in temperature and humidity of the inside of the plant...
I found this YouTube channel---https://www.youtube.com/user/greeningofgavin/videos---that goes rather deep into the cheese making process. The host makes cheese---all types of cheese, at home. It's pretty interesting to see the similarities and differences between cheeses.
The distinction is irrelevant to the point made by the parent. That it's simply just "cheese for pizza" does not negate the fact that significant process tech is leveraged when manufacturing a product of strict quality and consistency at scale.
Sure, no doubt that tech and a strict control on production and ingredients is needed, just like any industrial product, and evidently they are very good at both, I was just referring to the "just looking at mozzarella" part.
A large number of cheeses called mozzarella on the market are very different from mozzarella and most shouldn't be even called so.
The article goes into some detail on this precise question:
> Pizza Hut franchises would sometimes wait too long to thaw the presliced mozzarella and reported that their cheese would crumble, so Leprino Foods responded with its first major breakthrough: a preservative mist. The scientists there soon realized that this method allowed them to add flavors such as salted caramel and jalapeño. They could even make a reduced fat "cheddar" by using a mozzarella base and then misting on cheddar flavor and orange food coloring.
> When Pizza Hut began using a hotter conveyor oven, Leprino Foods changed the formula so the cheese wouldn't burn at higher temperatures. As delivery-focused Domino's expanded, Leprino's head cheese maker, Lester Kielsmeier, manipulated the product so that it retained its fresh-out-of-the-oven look and taste longer.
> in the 1990s, Kielsmeier realized that just as the cheese changed when ingredients were sprayed on at the end, certain additives used early in the process could affect how cheese melts--from how big and how brown the bubbles get to how many are on the top of the pie. On the manufacturing side, Kielsmeier cut down the cheese's aging period from 14 days to just four hours, which multiplied the company's production capabilities while cutting costs significantly.
HN is also about business, and this business owner decided to OEM his cheese rather than brand it and sell direct to consumers. "How do you get your first 10 / 100 / 1000 customers?" is often asked on HN, and one answer is "Don't sell directly to them, sell to the people who sell to them".
Also, HN is about many things that are not tech nor business, but which are deeply interesting to hackers.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
The article discusses a number of cheese production innovations that contributed to Leprino's ability to massively scale production and control the market. These advances are also detailed in Kielsmeier's patents:
