Real milk, no cows needed: Lab-made dairy products are now a reality

Milk, egg and other animal products can now be brewed in the lab using familiar fermentation processes, requiring regulators to reconsider what truly makes something "milk" or "cheese"

Technology 11 August 2021

By Graham Lawton

Yagi Studio/Getty Images

BACK IN 2014, bioengineer Ryan Pandya had a demoralising encounter with a bagel. It wasn’t so much the bagel itself as its filling, a “bland and runny” substance made from soya which was supposed to resemble cream cheese. Pandya was a recent convert to veganism and was struggling to give up dairy products. But when life dealt him bad cream cheese, he made ice cream.

Today, Pandya’s company Perfect Day is at the vanguard of a food revolution. It makes and sells milk, but has no cows. Its farm is a bioreactor in which it cultivates microorganisms genetically engineered to secrete milk proteins. The proteins don’t resemble milk – they are milk, identical to the real thing. Perfect Day hasn’t quite cracked cream cheese yet, but has arguably gone one better: ice cream. It is the only such milk company to get a product on the market so far, but won’t be the last.

The past couple of years have been an absolute beanfeast for people like Pandya who want to give up animal products but also don’t want to give them up. Plant-based burgers from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have proved that vegan “meat” can get pretty close to the real thing. Cultured meat – actual muscle tissue grown from stem cells – is being served in high-end restaurants and is inching closer to the mass market.

But between these two extremes, a third revolution has quietly been brewing. Quite literally. It is called “precision fermentation”, which means using genetically engineered microorganisms to produce animal products. Milk is where most of the action is right now, but is …