100% natural cheese wax

The newly developed ProCera® Natural cheese wax that we are launching to the market today is therefore a big deal worldwide, because it is a cheese wax that possesses all the familiar characteristics of the waxes that are currently used in dairy production with none of the fossil raw materials.

ProCera® Natural is developed by Procudan and tested in collaboration with leading Scandinavian dairies. The patented recipe consists among other things of beeswax. All the other ingredients are made from materials of natural origin.

The objective behind the development process that led to the new product was to make cheese packaging free of fossil-based materials, while still providing a product that dairies will be able to use without having to implement changes to their production methods.

Natural cheeses deserve natural wax

Cheese wax has various applications. It is used to mature cheeses and to protect them during transportation. In many parts of the world it is also used as an attractive form of shop display packaging.

ProCera® Natural has been tested to be able to serve all these functions. Testing took place at Procudan’s own test lab and off-site at some of Europe’s biggest dairies. The concept was that dairies would only have to make minor adjustments when transitioning from a traditional wax to this natural variant.

Procudan also sees considerable potential for ProCera® Natural to be used as sales packaging to support the narrative of a cheese’s quality and natural origin. Until now there have been no options that did not involve the packaging of cheese in various materials like plastics and waxes based on fossil oil.

Because ProCera® Natural is a natural product that can be associated with beehives, the packaging’s characteristics can now be used to actively market the cheese.

More than 5,000 recipes tested

From start to finish, the Procudan development team had to test more than 5,000 different recipes before finally producing some prototypes and variants that covered every customer requirement.

The project was supported along the way by Innovation Fund Denmark’s InnoBooster programme and the European Eurostars innovation programme.

The Danish Technological Institute was the project’s permanent scientific partner. Experts from several universities were involved in both the direct development of ProCera® Natural and in coming up with completely new technical methods of analysing and testing cheese wax according to a precise foundation that is based on real data.