“…Artificial neural networks have been used successfully in the dairy industry to predict shelf life (as reviewed by Goyal and Goyal, 2012), physicochemical composition (Etzion et al, 2004;Khanmohammadi et al, 2009), and sensory characteristics (Singh et al, 2009;; to discriminate varieties, geographical origin, or seasonal variations (He et al, 2005;Cruz et al, 2009Cruz et al, , 2013Gori et al, 2012); to control milk quality (Hettinga et al, 2008;Souza et al, 2011); and to model operational parameters during product manufacture (Funahashi and Horiuchi, 2008). As far as cheese manufacture is concerned, ANN have been applied mainly for authentication, classification, or traceability purposes (Pillonel et al, 2005;Zeppa et al, 2005;Barile et al, 2006;Verdini et al, 2007;Cevoli et al, 2011Cevoli et al, , 2013 but also for predicting ripening (Soto-Barajas et al, 2013) or moisture (Jimenez-Marquez et al, 2003 or the optimization of the cheese-making process (Paquet et al, 2000;Horiuchi et al, 2004).…”