Industrial Gouda cheese production shows batch-to-batch variations

The industrial production of Gouda cheeses is still affected by batch-to-batch variation that is partly attributed to the use of different starter culture mixtures in rotation. The current study aimed to unravel the variation not related to starter rotation, and to characterize the main steps determining cheese quality during production and ripening, by following up two Gouda cheese productions made with the same starter culture mixture. Hereto, culture-dependent analysis by means of plating on selective agar media, culture-independent analysis through amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing (HTS) of the full-length 16S rRNA gene, and meta-metabolomics were combined.