By Maria Andrea Gonzales
Dairy has been a part of our daily routine throughout our entire lives — milk is the main thing we drink as infants, and after outgrowing plain milk consumption we still find it in the cheese, butter and desserts we all love. However, with the recent surge in the popularity of plant-based milk and awareness of the dairy industry’s environmental impact, it’s clear that consumers are looking for more eco-friendly ways to enjoy the creaminess of traditional dairy. This is where alternative dairy, also known as lab-made dairy, comes in. In this article, we will dive into the science of making lab-made dairy and take a look at the main companies leading the change into a cow-free dairy world.
Making milk in a lab?
At first, it might seem nearly impossible to make milk in the laboratory exactly as it is produced by cows. However, startups have already started creating dairy alternative products acclaimed for being “indistinguishable” from the real thing. The secret behind the making of these alternative dairy products lies in what gives milk its characteristic creaminess and flavor: proteins. Casein and whey proteins are the main solids found in milk after sugars, and their structure is what gives milk its flavor and texture. When talking about lab-made dairy, startups usually only focus on producing the proteins found in traditional dairy. The other components of milk — fats, sugars and minerals — are usually obtained from plant-based sources which are then to be combined with the milk proteins. That’s right — milk made in the lab isn’t 100% identical to “‘real milk” just yet, but it can replicate its properties a lot better than plant-based alternatives can.
The proteins themselves are produced via synthetic biology, that is, by genetically modifying microorganisms to make the proteins for us. First, we find the genetic sequences for bovine casein and whey proteins in online databases such as NCBI. Then, we synthesize those genes in DNA and insert them into suitable microorganisms, turning them into little milk protein factories. Once these are produced, they are harvested and purified to be mixed with fats, sugars, minerals and water, the other main components of milk. With that, a vegan yet creamy lab-made milk is obtained. This process is sometimes referred to as “precision fermentation” in media and articles. After that, if you wish to make milk-based products such as cheese or yogurt, the standard fermentation process that is used with cow milk can be used.
What are some of the startups in the field?
The idea to make a vegan cheese using recombinant protein had been circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area biohacker community since at least 2011. Members of the current Real Vegan Cheese team actually tried to start a Highschool team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition on the topic in 2012, followed by our 2014 entry as a team competing in iGEM (look for an upcoming blog post on the early days of th e Real Vegan Cheese project!). Our iGEM project aimed to make vegan cheese from lab-produced casein proteins, and we continued to pursue this goal even after the competition ended. There are several startups that have begun their journey into lab-made dairy production in the last few years.
Perfect Day, a Bay Area-based startup, also started out in 2014, initially named “Muufri'' before rebranding to its current title in 2016. With $350 million in seed funding and valued at $1.5B, they are the only company currently working in the lab-made dairy market, producing a whey protein (b-lactoglobulin) and two casein proteins (kappa and beta casein). Since the company operates under a B2B model, proteins are sold to alternative dairy companies such as Brave Robot and Modern Kitchen, ice cream and cream cheese producers respectively, who use Perfect Day’s proteins to incorporate into their groceries. Perfect Day is also looking to expand its frontiers to produce animal-free fats in the lab for their use in dairy alternative products along with their milk proteins.
After 2014, the next big years for animal-free dairy were 2017 and 2018, as four major cheese startups: Nobell Foods, Formo, Biomilk and New Culture were founded. Having raised $75M in a Series B funding round and $100M so far, San Francisco-based startup Nobell Foods - founded by former Real Vegan Cheese member Magi Richani - aims to produce milk proteins, specifically caseins. However, they achieve this in a different way from the previous organizations mentioned so far: by genetically engineering soybean plants to express caseins. These are later harvested from the plant and can be processed into cheese. According to the company, they chose the soybean plant as it makes protein more efficiently than any other crop while potentially being cheaper than cow milk. They plan on releasing mozzarella and cheddar cheese in the market by 2023. Formo, formerly known as Legendairy Foods, is a Berlin-based startup focusing on lab-made cheese. With a seed funding of $50 million and having gained a total of $101M in 4 funding rounds since, they are also aiming to have their lab made mozzarella and ricotta cheese in the market by 2023. Similarly, the San Francisco-based startup New Culture is also working in the vegan cheese department. They work with engineered yeast to produce alpha, beta and kappa caseins to mix with coconut, sunflower and canola oil along with water, sugar and minerals to ferment into mozzarella. The startup, founded in late 2018 received a $3.5M seed funding and has obtained $5.1M up to date. The last startup to have started in 2018 is Biomilk, an Israel-based company a bit different from the rest. Biomilk, unlike most companies in the list, doesn’t work with microbes or plants. Instead, they work with mammalian cells. They isolate bovine mammary cells and culture them in bioreactors that mimic the conditions found inside of the animal, which enables them to grow and develop until they secrete milk, like they would inside the cow. The company received $2 million as funding to make their innovative idea possible.
Remilk and Fantastic Farms, founded in 2019, are two other Israeli dairy alternative startups to join the race. The former is working with microbes to express caseins for the making of milk. The latter is instead working with plants, engineering them to produce dairy proteins to later extract them and make dairy products. In that same year, another San Francisco-based company, Change Foods, was born with an ambitious goal — producing milk fats through synthetic biology for their use in cheese. The startup, with $3M in seed funding, aims to make not only caseins, but also milk fats to replace the plant-based oils used in the making of animal-free dairy cheese. Like fellow startups Formo and Nobell Foods, they are also planning on releasing their first consumer-available product in 2023.
Even through the COVID-19 pandemic, two other companies have managed to start out in 2020, with the most recent one having announced its first appearance in August this year. We are talking about Those Vegan Cowboys, Imagindairy and Renegade Creamery; Dutch, Israeli, and Minneapolis-based startups respectively. Those Vegan Cowboys, like a lot of startups in this list, specialize in casein production for cheesemaking as well as milk. Imagindairy follows a similar path to Perfect Day, as they also use a B2B model and are starting out with selling whey proteins to various companies interested in making vegan dairy products. Finally, the latest startup to join the crew is Renegade Creamery, an initiative developed by General Mills in 2021 aiming to commercialize cheddar and cream cheese obtained from animal-free milk proteins.
Starting with Real Vegan Cheese before 2014, the lab-made dairy industry has grown to have more than a dozen startup companies currently in business (check out the excellent 2020 State of the Industry Report by the Good Food Institute). Some of these companies have even announced their first commercial cheeses to come to the market as soon as 2023. Here in RVC, we have great pride in being the first organization to have started working on this idea and being able to say we have mentored people in our weekly meetings that later went off to fund some of the startups mentioned in the list above. We hope to continue working towards this common goal and inspiring people to join us in the journey. To learn more about the early days of RVC and how we began, tune in to our next blog post: The History of Real Vegan Cheese.
Maria Andrea Gonzales is a 4th year Bioengineering undergraduate in UTEC (Lima, Peru). She is currently an intern in Real Vegan Cheese, helping out in the search for hypoallergenic caseins and media article writing. Maria Andrea is passionate about synthetic biology, working on various research projects in the food and agrotech sector.