My Job Is The Greate-est

Lisa Powell (33), of cambridge, is a cheese technologist and was a judge at the nz champions of cheese awards.

- Ciara Pratt

Let’s just say cheese has always been the dream! I’ve wanted to work with cheese, beer or wine since I studied and moved back home to New Zealand from the UK to become a senior cheese technologist. I’ve been doing that for six years and this was my first year being a cheese judge.

When most people hear about what I do, they can’t believe it’s a job and always ask if I get to eat cheese all day. The answer is yes! I eat cheese at least once a day – you have to when you’re making it. But they probably wouldn’t know about all the other details of what I do as a cheese technologist, which to some might sound a bit boring.

Believe it or not, I spend most of my time on the computer doing project development work, which could involve looking at new ingredients and trialling them in our factories. It takes a lot of work!

By the time you do a trial, you might do a couple of vats worth of cheese – each vat holds 30,000 litres of milk. You end up with quite a few tonnes of cheese. Then you do a maturation profile to see how the cheese develops over the next year – does it need to be stored at a different temperature, for example?