KNOXVILLE, Tennessee — Do you love the University of Tennessee so much you wish you could just gobble it up?
Well soon you can, in the form of cheese, which is arguably the best thing to gobble.
UT's Food Science Department is no stranger to cheese production. They've been selling their All Vol Cheese for a few years now with Sweetwater Valley Farm in Loudon County.
"We wanted something a little more unique and different that has an interesting twist to it," said Sweetwater co-owner John Harrison. "And I think we settled on this putting the Power T inside of a piece of cheese."
You read that right. Power T cheese is now in production, and it looks like this:
My mom always said UT orange looked like the color of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and now you can make your own mac and cheese fueled by the Volunteer spirit.
Or maybe you're in the mood for a sandwich. Can you imagine the charcuterie board you can make with these bad boys?
Anything cheese can do, Power T cheese can do better. And it, like all things great, is the product of collaboration.
"We were kind of batting around different ideas and came up with this concept of inverting the colors," said Jessica Black, Account Executive for UT'S Food Science Department.
But then the big question came. How do they do that?
That's where UT's Industrial and Systems Engineering Department comes into play.
Floyd Ostrowski, Assistant Professor of Practice in the engineering school, started working with one of his students to figure out how to invert the cheese.
"I was 3D printing some models, trying to see what worked. We played around with a couple different ideas including molding the cheese, cutting the cheese using kind of a cookie cutter style cheese cutter," said industrial engineering student John Hendershott.
They landed on a cookie cutter.
But it's not as simple as buying a Power T cookie cutter at the grocery store and cutting out some cheese.
They had to design a thick enough cutter with durable metal that could be sanitized. That's why the 3D printed models never made it to the cutting board.
There's only one prototype right now, so only two people can make the Power T cheese at a time.
UT Food Science undergraduate student Erin Strickland helped cut the cheese at Sweetwater on Tuesday.
She cut a Power T out of the middle of a 10 ounce block of cheese, and handed the block to a Sweetwater worker, who punched out the Power T cut out and laid it next to the block with a new Power T shaped hole in the middle.
The pair did this with both white and mild cheddar cheese, and simply switched out the middles, creating white blocks with orange T's and orange blocks with white T's.
A simple-seeming process that took a year to finally nail down.
Hendershott showed schematics for a stamping machine that would produce the new cheese faster. Improving efficiency is the next step, as it currently takes about 3 hours to make 80 blocks of Power T cheese.
The team behind the product said it was worth all the work to see something that is honestly just really cool.
"It's not just the Power T, it's about our students. It's about collaboration. It's about a purpose, you know there's a mission behind it," said Black.
Proceeds from All Vol Cheese sales go straight back to the students in the food science program in the forms of scholarships and experiential learning opportunities.
Black hopes the Power T cheese is popular, because it means more comes back to the students who are working hard to create this product.
"You are helping our students and helping our university by being part of us," said Black.
A 10-ounce block will cost $10 before shipping. The department will begin taking preorders later this fall at this website. They'll announce soon what day that link will be live.