New Vegan Dairy Products are Made in a Lab
As people are becoming more socially conscious about where their food comes from and how it impacts the planet, they are choosing animal-free plant-based options. Cow free meat has been around for quite some time and the popularity of brands like Beyond Meat and cultivated meat from Israeli food tech startup Aleph Farms and others are soaring.
While there is a myriad of plant-based vegan milk substitutes made from soy, rice, oats, coconuts, and almonds, none of them have the same texture or taste of cow’s milk. And sometimes a soy latté just doesn’t cut it. Now, an Israeli food tech startup Remilk created real dairy products without harming a single cow or the planet.
The company, which was founded in 2019, stresses that their product Remilk is not a milk substitute but rather is the real deal. Made from a special process called microbial fermentation, milk is fashioned in a lab instead of in a cow. And the end product is very healthy, contains no cholesterol, lactose, hormones, or antibiotics.
“In a very simple way, we take the gene that encodes for the milk protein,” Aviv Wolff, CEO of Remilk, told NoCamels. “The gene functions as an instruction book for the production of the protein it encodes. And so, we insert the gene into a microbe that we’ve developed and it instructs our microbe to produce the specific protein in a very efficient and scalable way.”
The company says that the lab produced milk tastes identical to the real thing and they hope to eventually replace cows by creating every dairy product sold. They expect to roll out vegan cheese and yogurt in addition to milk.
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“Remilk was founded with the mission to stop using animals to produce our food because, as dairy lovers, we realize that giving up on milk is not an option,” Wolf said. “But today’s milk comes with an unreasonable price tag. The dairy industry is destructive to our planet, our health, and our animals, and is simply not sustainable anymore.”
The environmental price tag of dairy farming is way too high. According to the World Wildlife Fund, dairy cows add a huge amount of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming and climate change as well as foul the air around them. Airy operations consume large amounts of water and runoff of manure and fertilizers from these farms get into local waterways.
The production of Remilk uses only 5 percent of the resources and only 1 percent of the waste of producing cow’s milk according to the company. And they accomplish this by being 100 percent cruelty free unlike dairy farms.
The company recently raised $11 in funding from investors including food companies Tnuva, Tempo, and Hochland according to The Times of Israel. This funding will help Remilk expand its production and distribution capabilities and allow them to enter the global marketplace. Remilk’s vegan milk may be coming to a store near you soon.
