ReMilk: Israeli startup company serves up dairy products made without animals
Remilk is making dairy products that are identical to cow-milk products, with the same taste, texture, stretchiness, meltiness, with no cholesterol, no lactose and NO COWS.
SHOSHANNA SOLOMON: Israeli startup Remilk hopes to be the first company in the world to bring real dairy milk products to market without needing a single cow in the process. “Relying on animals to make our food is no longer sustainable,” said Aviv Wolff, who co-founded the startup up last year. “The implications of animal farming are devastating for our planet.” The time has come, he said, for “a new revolutionary invention that will enable the transition to a food system that takes no more than what our planet can give.”
The technology Wolff and his scientist partner Ori Cohavi have developed produces milk proteins that are “chemically identical” to those present in cow-produced milk and dairy products, explained Wolff in a phone interview. That essentially means they are dairy products with dairy proteins, minus the cows… The two entrepreneurs mapped out the chemical composition of milk, assessed the fat, lactose and sugar in the liquid, and determined that the key ingredient to making milk is the proteins….
“We’re making dairy products that are identical to cow-milk products, with the same taste, texture, stretchiness, meltiness, with no cholesterol and no lactose,” he said. “We’ve basically ported the whole mechanism of producing milk into a single-cell microbe. We don’t need the ‘rest of the cow,’ and we surely don’t need to spend resources in the process of creating a 900-kilogram animal”…
The product is ready but not yet ripe for commercialization, as the partners are now trying to lower the production price of the protein, he said. Because of the generally low price of milk globally, the company will not initially be able to compete with liquid milk and will focus initially on cheese products, Wolff said…
This model of food production will be up to 100 times more land efficient than the existing dairy system, 25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time-efficient, and 10 times more water-efficient, he said… There are some 270 million cows that produce milk — along with greenhouse gas emissions that add to climate change. Furthermore, dairy farming and feed production can lead to the loss of ecologically important areas such as wetlands, forests and prairies. Global estimates say that to produce one liter of milk, a massive 1,020 liters of water are needed. SOURCE…
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