DEVELOPING A QUALITY INDEX FOR MANAGING THE QUALITY OF RAW MILK IN THE FARM

摘要

With significant changes in the food supply pattern from small stores to large supermarkets as well as less frequent shopping cycles in recent years, there is an increasing demand for dairy products with extended shelf life. That's why dairy processors stress on receiving raw milk with the highest quality. To address this, transportation companies need to make sure that the collected milk from farms is in its highest quality. However, the current procedure of milk collection by the transporter in farms has two obstacles; first, quite often the collected milk from farms passes both the temperature and senses test at the pickup point which are performed by the transporter, but subsequently when it reaches to the dairy processor, it is rejected due to unacceptable level of bacteria present in it. This will result to a substantial financial loss for both the farmer and the transporter. Second is that when collecting the milk at the farm, the transporter has no information about the cooling history of the milk from the earliest point of extraction to the final point of pickup to check if the milk has been cooled down according to the standard and its resulting quality. In this paper, we address this drawback by developing a function to calculate the milk quality in the tank which is ready to be picked up by the transporter. This information allows the transporter to make informed and smart decisions at two levels. First is whether to accept milk from the farmer or not and second is to decide to which processors the collected milk should be assigned according to the processors' demands.