New vacuum packs enable long-life cheese

Cheese capable of surviving in vacuum packs for long enough to feed cosmonauts in space has been developed by the Russian Ostankino Dairy and may offer opportunities to improve shelf-life on Russia’s soaring cheese market, reports Angela Drujinina.

Cheese capable of surviving in vacuum packs for long enough to feed cosmonauts in space has been developed by the Russian Ostankino Dairy and may offer opportunities to improve shelf-life on Russia’s soaring cheese market, reports Angela Drujinina. Ostankino said its Karat factory had received a special order for its Drujba sintered cheese from the Russian government to feed cosmonauts on missions within the earth’s orbit. The firm said an exclusive packaging technology devised by Karat meant the cheese would not have to be dehydrated like normal space food. Instead the new Drujba formula maintains the freshness, taste and useful properties of its earthly counterpart by being packed in a vacuum container with “specially created conditions”. Ostankino said the cheese contained no preservatives.