s Patents on the Advances in Dairy Industry

The current work is aimed to give an overview on the most relevant patents available on dairy industry. To the aim, both processing and product innovations will be reviewed. In particular, novel tools applied to traditional dairy plants to optimize the heat treatments and reduce the disadvantages derived from the direct use of heat on product quality will be reported. Advances applied for delivering dairy starter cultures to better control contamination of process lines will be also discussed. Some relevant inventions to reduce the length of time required during the manufacturing or to decrease the aging time of dairy products will be presented. Finally, the advances to enhance functional and/or sensory properties of dairy products will be reported. In particular, processing methods to achieve milk-derived products with desired morphological and/or compositional characteristics will be reviewed.