Room-temperature preservation of a hot-filled cheese whey beverage

The Brazilian dairy industry launches several new products on the market every year, including products with high nutritional value and low-cost manufacturing technology. Focusing on this issue, a cheese whey beverage thermally treated after fermentation was hot-filled and evaluated for 84 days. During the beverage manufacturing, we applied a mild heat treatment in combination with low pH aiming to store the beverage at room temperature. PET bottles were used to hot filling of the product. To assess the product stability during the storage period, we performed, periodically, physico-chemical, microbiological and sensory analysis. The obtained results were analyzed by the Analysis of Variance and Tukey's test. Physical-chemical and microbiological analysis indicated that the beverage remained stable; however, the flavor was altered during the storage period. Since hot-filling of dairy beverages in PET bottles is a low cost-effective procedure easily deployed in dairy plants, this process allows the productive use of cheese whey. A remarkable advantage of such product is its possible storage at room temperature, reducing distribution and sales expenditures with cooling.