Cheesy on the stomach: Animal-Free Dairy

Written by Swathi Kumar, edited by Farisha Colbourne and Ryan Khan.

Unlike Any Udder Milk

In October 2014, two open community labs in the San Francisco Bay Area entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s prestigious international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) synthetic biology competition with their ‘Real Vegan Cheese’ (RVC) project and went on to win a gold medal. Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious collaborate on this grassroots, non-profit project with the goal of producing cow’s cheese without using cows. There are several benefits to being able to make cow’s milk without cattle. The process is more sustainable as it only requires 10% of the 1000 litres of water a cow consumes to produce a litre of milk. Similarly, only 1% of land and 4% of feedstock are needed, meaning that milk could be produced within a city as opposed to vast acres of farmland. Environmentally speaking, the process uses 80% less energy and does not contribute to methane emissions – a major cause of rising global temperatures. Not only does lab-grown milk not contain hormones or antibiotics, but it is free from cholesterol and lactose which is switched with a better-tolerated plant sugar. The finished product is just as rich in calcium and tastes exactly the same as milk from cattle – only much cleaner.

The Science Behind the Cheese

So far, RVC have produced small quantities of cheese. They plan to spin off a commercial venture and keep the intellectual property freely accessible as they are dedicated to Open Science. If you want to start a cheesemaking company, look no further, as RVC have published all their information under free-culture licences. The project works to produce real cheese using cellular agriculture, or in other words, microbial fermentation. The process begins with choosing a milk-producing animal whose genome has been fully sequenced. A 2015 article states one of RVC’s goals is to engineer cheese based on narwhal milk, which they say has a toothpaste-like consistency! The next step to making narwhal milk would be to identify the genes, that encode cheese proteins called caseins, in the narwhal genome which was sequenced in 2019. The narwhal casein genes would then be expressed in brewer’s yeast or a bacterial colony such as E. coli to produce the casein proteins. A large batch of microbes are grown in an engineered microflora and the casein proteins can then be extracted and purified. Purified caseins are then combined to form tiny protein spheres which make casein micelles and give milk its white colour.

The same cheesemaking procedure that has been used for thousands of years is then used to ferment the milk - caseins are combined with fat such as vegetable butter, a vegan sugar alternative and other proteins (11 proteins form the foundation of RVC’s cheese). In 2018, the RVC team secured private funding to produce four cheese proteins - alpha-s1, alpha-s2, beta casein and kappa casein. Different caseins form different cheeses, for example, kappa casein is used to create mozzarella. Once the constituents are combined and the respective ageing process is complete, you have narwhal cheese! RVC’s narwhal cheese sub-project includes unicorn mythophylogenetics, which used ancestral sequence reconstruction to propose that narwhal, horse and rhino are unicorn descendants. Could combining casein proteins from these three species lead to a unicorn cheese prototype?

The Brie-ginning of a New Era

The concept of cow-free cow’s cheese has been explored by several start-ups. Founded in 2014, Perfect Day is the first company to have brought a product to market. The San Francisco-based company has raised $361.5 million in funding and in 2019, released three ice cream flavours made from their lab-grown casein and whey proteins – chocolate, vanilla salted fudge and vanilla blackberry toffee. In November 2020, Perfect Day partnered with Graeter’s Ice Cream to launch a line of ice creams called Perfect Indulgence, currently available only in America. New Culture, another San Francisco based start-up, was founded in 2018 and have obtained $5.1 million in funding. Excitingly, you can put yourself on their waiting list for fresh mozzarella made using their own casein proteins. Currently, Perfect Day is the only company that offers products available to the consumer.

The animal-free dairy business spread to Europe in 2018 when German start-up Legendairy Foods was founded. The company has secured $4.7 million in funding and is aiming to produce mozzarella and ricotta. Also founded in 2018, Israeli start-up Remilk is the only Asian start-up of its kind and has secured $11.3 million in funding. Remilk describes their milk as “revolutionary” since it can be made into cheese and yoghurt, unlike common nut milks such as soy milk and almond milk. The industry expanded to Australia when US-Australian start-up Change Foods was founded the following year. The company has since raised $1.3 million and given their casein production process a unique name – ‘precision fermentation’. Finally, Better Dairy is the UK’s first start-up that uses yeast fermentation to produce cheeses, yoghurts and ice creams. Better Dairy was founded in 2020 and have secured $2.2 million in funding.

Grate Expectations

Animal-free dairy products were conceptualized seven years ago, with the first product being released in 2019. Today, animal-free dairy start-ups exist in North America, Europe and Australia, despite these continents having the lowest prevalence of lactose intolerance. On the contrary, these vegan dairy alternatives possess a myriad of advantages ranging from sustainability to health benefits. As theorised by RVC, there’s scope for making cheese from any animal, so long as it has DNA encoding milk proteins in its genome. This decade will certainly see a boom in animal-free dairy and shopping for these products in your local supermarket will become a reality in the not-so-distant future. However, I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath on unicorn cheese.