String cheese is just mozzarella cheese that has been heated to 140 degrees. At this temperature the cheese becomes very stretchy and the milk proteins move around and line up together in a row. It's this alignment that makes string cheese so stringy! And that's all there is to it. No strange processing. No toxic chemicals. Just the realigning of milk proteins.
Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.
To be fair the same thing happened to toilet paper around the same time. Most people don't buy more than a gallon of milk 🥛 at a time because it's a very pershiable product.
The economics of such a machine are completely nuts - a million dollar machine for a 50 or 100 head dairy in a tie stall barn but its a fascinating technological example using LIDAR sensors and advanced robotics. Could the technology ever become cheap enough to be used on tie stall dairies? Probably not but it's still a neat concept.
Further evidence that if you want to avoid getting Coronavirus you should drink more milk.