A start up found by two scientists with a background in biomedical engineering, where they produce cow milk by brewing with yeast.
The company called as Perfect Day co-founded by Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandh produces this synthetic milk which looks and tasted like cow’s milk.
Vegans and people who are lactose intolerant have a few plant-based alternatives, like soy milk and almond milk, but if those who have tried either of those, already know that they taste nothing like real milk. And that’s exactly what Ryan and Perumal were trying to create – a synthetic milk that didn’t come from cows but tasted just like it and had all its nutrients. It sounds impossible, but the two say that their innovative product relies on technology that has been around for a while.
Three years ago, one was working on next-generation vaccines in Boston, and the other on tissue engineering, in New York. They didn’t know each other but they had a mutual acquaintance who knew that they both had this crazy idea about making milk without cows, and he put them in touch. They hit it off and started working on a way of making their dream a reality.
We wanted to see if we could apply that same type of thinking—taking medical technology and using it to make better, safer food,” Pandya said.
“The way we’re doing that is the same way that proteins are made for a million other things today. The way proteins are made for medicine and multivitamins and laundry detergent—even proteins to help clean up stains and stuff—it’s all made the same way.” he added.
Making Perfect Day milk starts with yeast, but not just any yeast. “That yeast we’ve nicknamed ‘Buttercup’ because it’s sort of acting like our cow,” Pandya said. Basically, they took this “boring, very studied, very characterized little yeast” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and turned it into a milk making cow using 3D printing technology.
What they did was get their hands on a cow’s DNA blueprint, and used the 3D printer to create it a laboratory. They then inserted this DNA sequence into a specific location of the yeast to make it act as their cow. Now, when the yeast fermented sugar as it usually does, it made real milk proteins (casein and whey), which were then combined with plant-based fats and nutrients to create lactose-free milk.
“Your body cannot tell the difference because it’s the same in every meaningful way,” Ryan Pandya said. It tastes almost exactly the same, has the same texture, but doesn’t contain any lactose and doesn’t come from real cows.
Their website claims that:
“Our products are made from real milk proteins combined with plant-based (lactose-free) sugar, healthy plant fats, vitamins, and minerals,”. “They have the same taste and texture as cow’s milk, but pack in more nutrition with no food safety or contamination concerns.”
Perfect Day is animal friendly (as they say, cows could use a day off), environment-friendly, lactose-free, hormone, antibiotic and steroid-free, cholesterol-free and has a longer shelf life than cow milk. It sounds like milk 2.0, but some people may have a problem with the genetic engineering required to produce it. After all GMO concerns are very trendy these days. However Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandh assure us that there is nothing to worry about.
The final product is filtered and purified of all the genetically-modified yeast used in the production cycle, which effectively makes it a non-GMO food product. Communicating this to the general public is one of the main goals of Perfect Day.
But they’re not just about milk. Perfect Day says their product can also be used to create cheese, yoghurt, ice cream and pizza.
Investors have already pumped $4 million into the business.
Perfect day hopes to launch their first synthetic milk product by the end of 2017.
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