TEIKEI Network › Breeders, Farms, and Producers › Seeds and Breeding · 3 min read
Cheese, yogurt, sourdough bread, and fermented vegetables are not made from milk, flour, or cabbage alone. They are created by microorganisms: bacteria, yeasts, and molds. These cultures are also bred, preserved, and propagated.
Breeding thus extends into processing, even to the development of new cheese varieties with new bacterial cultures.
A culture influences how a food tastes, how it matures, and how long it keeps. Whoever provides the culture determines what is possible in a dairy or bakery.
Cultures are alive. Like seeds, they must be maintained and passed on, or they will be lost.
The molds used to ripen blue cheese and Camembert illustrate what happens when only a few strains are used:
New diversity is possible. In a cheese from Termignon in the French Alps, researchers discovered a previously unknown population, which they describe as a potential new source for cheese production (Crequer et al. 2023).
Switzerland shows how cultures can be collectively maintained. Agroscope maintains a collection of around 15,000 isolates, primarily lactic acid and propionic acid bacteria. Most were obtained in the 20th century from milk and fermented dairy products.
Since 2019, the strains from Swiss dairy products have been jointly owned by the federal government and the Swiss milk and cheese industry. Agroscope maintains the strains and develops new cultures from them, which are distributed to dairies through a dedicated organization (Agroscope).
Dairies, bakeries, and other artisanal businesses are among the producers in the TEIKEI Network. Processing enterprises further process raw materials from farms. For all of them, cultures are what seeds are to the field.
↑ Up one level: Seeds and Breeding
By Felix Schröder, with support from AI (Claude)
Created on October 10, 2026 · Last updated on October 11, 2026
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