DE-CALF LATTE: Lab-grown dairy is the future of milk, researchers say
Scientists say it will recreate dairy’s authentic mouthfeel and temperature resistance, and constitute the perfect texture for vegan cheese, capable of melting just like the real thing.
EMMA BEDDINGTON: For decades, people on plant-based diets were restricted to soya-based options to recreate dairy, until veganism went mainstream and a clutch of palate-pleasing almond, coconut and oat-based alternatives emerged… The holy grail now – according to researchers – is genuine dairy milk, made in a lab. A growing number of startups from Silicon Valley to Singapore are rapidly joining the race to create the first imitation cow’s milk, based on artificially reproducing the proteins in curds (casein) and whey, that is suitable for mass market consumption. Scientists say it will recreate dairy’s authentic mouthfeel and temperature resistance, and constitute the perfect texture for vegan cheese, capable of melting just like the real thing…
The barrier, according to Marite Cardenas, a researcher at Malmö University working on casein protein, is that mimicking the proteins found in cow’s milk to create lab-grown dairy is a “biotechnological challenge”. It’s usually done by giving microorganisms a genetic code that enables them to produce real milk proteins through a precision fermentation process – but this is difficult to do on the large scale required for manufacturing. Cardenas thinks recreating animal products will enable the food traditions many countries are proud of, such as cheese-making, to endure the societal shift to a more plant-based diet…
The only company to have brought protein fermentation-based products to market so far is Perfect Day, a Silicon Valley-based startup. It developed the first whey protein from cow’s milk, and now sells its products across 5,000 stores in the US. Chief executive and co-founder Ryan Pandya said his company was born out of a desire to figure out “what makes milk, milk”. He and his co-founders discovered that milk proteins, whey and casein, were the secret…
The problem is that the price remains prohibitively high for many consumers, at about £8 for a 550ml tub of Perfect Day ice-cream. This is a focus for another startup, New Culture, which is currently developing mozzarella cheese that melts perfectly for pizza using fermented protein-based milk. Chief scientist Inja Radman said the company has progressed enormously over the past two years in technological terms, but scaling this up to commercial manufacturing levels remains a challenge due to the slow process of running trials…
But she predicted that in the future, as the technology develops and governments shift subsidies away from industrial farming, companies like hers will be a cheaper option… The quest is big business, with the dairy alternatives market among the fastest growing of all packaged foods, and worth £2.5bn in western Europe in 2020-21, according to new figures from Euromonitor. In the UK, the market has grown by 69% over the past five years, with non-soya-based milks increasing by 129%. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: