Perfect Day and other companies making milk with precision fermentation promise animal-free, lower-carbon products through technology. They may also benefit from a lack of consumer understanding about the science.
When Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi stopped eating dairy around a decade ago, they found themselves at a loss to try to replace the creamy consistency associated with the milk and cheese they had grown up eating. In the ensuing years, the pair founded a startup called Muufri—which has since been renamed Perfect Day—dedicated to creating “dairy without the cows.”
“They would open their fridge and it was stacked with all of these plant-based options that were fine, right?” Nikki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, told the local publication Berkeleyside last year. “But it just wasn’t the same thing as stretchy cheese on pizza, or silky yogurt, or creamy ice cream.” The answer, Pandya and Ghandi decided, was to replicate the protein found in whey using precision fermentation to make products that are strikingly similar to “the real thing.” And, by many accounts, that plan seems to be going well for the company. Perfect Day provides its whey protein to existing food company “partners”—such as Graeter’s ice cream and General Mills, which uses it in its animal-free Bold Cultr cream cheese. The company also has its own consumer packaged goods (CPG) arm, called The Urgent Company, which has so far unveiled both an ice cream brand (Brave Robot) and a cream cheese brand (Modern Kitchen). Over the course of the last two years, Perfect Day has accumulated $750 million in funding. In November, it revealed a potential partnership with Starbucks and then, in December, The Urgent Company acquired the ice cream brand Coolhaus.
Ryan Pandya (left) and Perumal Gandhi with Perfect Day products. (Photo courtesy of Perfect Day)
Although Perfect Day—which received its first $2 million investment in 2014—has been a kind of pioneer in the space, it’s now one of a handful of companies making lab-produced milk. Competitors like Imaginedairy and RealDeal Milk all appear to be using a similar fermentation process. According to a 2020 report from the trade group the Good Food Institute, three quarters of precision fermentation companies are working on dairy. That may be because meat produced through cellular agriculture may ultimately be too costly to make it worth doing at scale. Or it may be that lots of consumers dream of a way around the pitfalls of dairy, but can’t break the habit.
Either way, “there is a real revolution going on here,” Jim Mellon, a biotech investor and the author of Moo’s Law: An investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, said about the trend when speaking to New Scientist last August. And yet while these “animal-free” dairy brands are promising lower-carbon, kinder products through technology, they may also be benefiting from the fact that most consumers know little to nothing about the science it relies on. And a number of the scientists and food system advocates Civil Eats spoke to worry that a loophole at the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) has allowed the company to declare its own products safe, despite being an ultra-processed food made with a novel set of proteins that have never before been on the market. There are also big questions about whether Perfect Day and its peers are simply providing a very expensive distraction from other more—to use their own word—urgent systemic solutions. Or, as Anna Lappé, sustainable food advocate and author of Diet for a Hot Planet (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), put it in a recent interview about the phenomenon: “I don’t think the conversation about alternative meat and dairy should take the place of the important conversation about how dominant the meat and dairy industry is, how it needs to be regulated better. We’re not going to take on that corporate power by choosing a different [product] in the marketplace.”
Perfect Day’s Promises
Although Perfect Day was founded by dedicated vegans, and promises consumers a “kinder world” on its website, the company’s marketing doesn’t share facts or spend time talking in detail about factory animal farming. Instead, it’s positioning itself in a more neutral way that might appeal to omnivores as well as vegans.
“We hear from vegans all the time who love our products, but our target consumer is really any food lover who wants to reduce their environmental footprint,” said Tim Geistlinger, Perfect Day’s chief scientific officer. Indeed the company says its supply chain results in as much as 97 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional milk. According to Briggs, if just 5 percent of the dairy industry replaced the whey in their products with Perfect Day’s, it would save 12.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions or the “equivalent to the carbon emitted from every single car registered in the city of Los Angeles.”
Photo courtesy of Perfect Day
Perfect Day also provides its own detailed life cycle analysis (LCA) of the powdered whey protein on its website, where it claims to use less “blue water” and use 60 percent less nonrenewable energy than traditional milk production. When the company released the 2021 LCA— which was created for Perfect Day by WSP, a global engineering and infrastructure company and reviewed by a panel of experts—Leonardo DiCaprio applauded the company’s “forward-looking vision.” However, Alastair Iles, associate professor of Sustainability Transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, is skeptical of the company’s claims, in part because they’re so dramatic.
“Biotech fermentation manufacturing can use up a lot of water and lead to significant wastewater pollution,” says Iles. “The centrifuge and drying parts will also use a lot of energy. This is why I would be a bit wary of a life cycle assessment that makes the big claims that the company does.” Case in point, while the LCA claims the emissions are reduced by anywhere from 85 to 97 percent, the company has chosen to use the largest number in its materials. And while the analysis is “based on projected production at a co-manufacturing site in the U.S.,” Geistlinger told Civil Eats that the company produces “our protein at a number of large food manufacturing sites globally.”
“We work with our co-manufacturers to ensure consistency regardless of where our protein is being produced, so our LCA is an accurate reflection of our protein production process,” he added. “That being said, we do plan to conduct additional analyses to even more deeply understand how aspects like geography may impact how we are creating a kinder, greener tomorrow and how we maximize that impact.”
Transparency and GRAS
On a weekday in December, the Perfect Day offices, located in an industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley, are nearly empty. After giving a reporter a short tour of the laboratory and test kitchen, Geistlinger offers up a tasting of the surprisingly creamy Modern Kitchen cream cheese on crackers.
“We want to be very transparent,” he said. “We want people to understand what we do and how it’s very much building on what the food industry has been doing for over 40 years, but we’re taking the next step.” Geistlinger also stressed the fact that Perfect Day is using the same percentage of protein that you’d find in traditional dairy. “We want it to be the same as what the animal is offering. Most vegan products are very low on protein—they’re mostly starches and gums—but we’re matching [dairy] on protein, because we don’t want customers to feel like they’re cheated on that,” he said.
That protein ferments in giant vats similar to the way beer does, but the process differs greatly from what most consumers think of when they hear the word “fermentation.” That’s because it involves genetically modifying a type of fungi similar to yeast (with genetic code from an online database) in a solution with sugar so that it excretes something called Beta-lactoglobulin. Then it’s spun in a centrifuge and dehydrated before combined with water and fats like coconut oil to create a “milk.” Iles describes Beta-lactoglobulin as “a key part [but not the only part—perhaps 65 percent] of cow whey. It’s the milk skin that forms on top of a drink when heated.” But Iles and others we spoke to have some questions about the fact that the ingredient is allowed to be sold in food due to the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS regulations, and it harkens back to debate about another ingredient in a meat alternative—the heme Impossible Foods makes using genetically engineered yeast.
“GRAS is now a way for food companies to quickly secure regulatory approvals of new food ingredients, as companies have more scope to make their own determinations and to provide the information they want to provide to the FDA. Plenty of food additives have been given GRAS status without real scrutiny; some may be quite safe for people to eat, but others might not be,” says Iles.
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