A Handbook for Dairymen 



The Influence of Temperature on the Storage of 

 Dairy Products. 



The keeping quality of milk or milk products de- 

 pends largely upon a uniform holding temperature. 

 If the temperature is allowed to go too high or 

 to fluctuate from day to day, the product will not 

 keep as long as when held constantly at the proper 

 temperature. 



When butter and cheese are held in a refrigerator 

 and the temperature rises, they not only deteriorate 

 in flavor and body and texture, but molds grow 

 rapidly and injure the quality. Bad flavors and 

 poor body and texture in practically all dairy prod- 

 ucts quickly develop under poor storage conditions. 



Many losses can be positively attributed to im- 

 proper storage temperatures. For example: The 

 writer knows of one case in which an ice-cream 

 manufacturer lost his entire business because of 

 the poor quality of his ice cream. The ice cream 

 was of good quality when it left the freezer, but be- 

 came grainy and icy during the hardening process, 

 due to uneven and, at times, too high a temperature. 



Another case of loss is that of the storage of 

 butter. A thousand tubs of butter were held in a 

 storage which occasionally became too warm and 

 damp so that molds rapidly grew. In this case, 

 each tub had to be stripped and the mold scraped 

 off. The butter sold at a loss of ten cents a pound, 

 or about six dollars a tub, because of the moldy 

 flavor. A loss of six thousand dollars could have 

 been avoided if only a very small fraction of that 

 sum had been invested in a recording thermometer. 



There is no definite length of time that a product 

 may be held in storage without deteriorating. 

 Time of deterioration depends upon the quality of 

 the product when put in and the temperature of 



