Development of functional whey cheese enriched in vitamin D₃: nutritional composition, fortification, analysis, and stability study during cheese processing and storage

Abstract

“Ricotta” cheese is a traditional and popular Italian fresh whey cheese commonly produced from cow’s milk. Food fortification is an efficient strategy to reduce the high global prevalence of vitamin D deficiency. This study aims to study the chemical-nutritional analysis of ricotta cheese and to assess its suitability as a dairy matrix for vitamin D fortification. The chemical-nutritional analyses revealed that ricotta cheese is a good source of proteins (7.8 g/100 g) with high levels of branched-chain amino acids (1.8 g/100 g). Moreover, ricotta contains high levels of calcium (0.4 g/100 g) and phosphorus (0.2 g/100 g). 50 mg of vitamin D₃ were added to 95 kg of cheese reaching a mean fortification level of 41.4 ± 4.0 µg/100 g of ricotta cheese. The fortification study showed that vitamin D homogenously distributes in ricotta cheese after the homogenisation process. Moreover, vitamin D₃ has high heat stability (93.8 ± 1.8%) and remains stable throughout the shelf-life of the fortified food. This study demonstrates that ricotta cheese represents an ideal alternative dairy matrix for vitamin D₃ fortification.

Keywords:

• Ricotta
• nutrients
• composition
• vitamin D3
• fortification
• functional food

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no financial conflict of interest or personal relationship that could have influenced the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

Authors are grateful to Sabelli S.p.a. (Ascoli Piceno, (AP) Italy) for the economic support in this research project.