Most of today’s vegan cheese startups face the challenge of reproducing cheese using ingredients like plant-based oils and nut milks. That’s no easy feat, as unique dairy proteins are responsible for some of the taste, stretch, and melt properties of cheese.

But alternative cheese may soon be getting a tech upgrade. A handful of startups have developed cow-free processes for replicating those key dairy proteins. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with the CEOs of two of those companies—New Culture and Moolec Science—to ask about the state of alternative cheese technology.

New Culture & precision fermentation

When California-based startup New Culture set out to develop a better alternative cheese, the company’s founders surveyed a range of processes that could be used to grow dairy proteins. Company CEO and co-founder Matt Gibson says that precision fermentation stood out because the technology had already been used by the conventional dairy industry at commercial scale.

“It’s a process that has been done time and time again,” says Gibson. Precision fermentation is used today to produce chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme. “And that means that all those risk factors that come with anything that you scale up have really been eliminated. It’s a tried-and-true method of going from a small fermentation shake flask of say 50 milliliters to a large fermentation tank of 200,000 liters.”

Continue Reading...