New Culture’s Animal-Free Dairy Protein Set To Disrupt $154 Billion Global Cheese Industry

"We are entering an era where we can produce massive amounts of real cheese without the involvement of any animals."

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A pizza with cow-free mozzarella. Credit: New Culture

Animal-free dairy company New Culture has announced a major milestone in scaling up its product to mass produce real dairy without using animals. 

New Culture’s innovative process replaces the essential dairy protein in cheese – called casein – with an animal-free version that the company produces using precision fermentation.

The company says it has now successfully scaled up its fermentation process to enable the production of 25,000 pizzas’ worth of cheese per run. The development, New Culture says, is a significant step towards supplying animal-free, dairy mozzarella to pizzerias across America.

Cow Cheese Without the Cow

The process is described as the world’s first-ever animal-free casein and, using precision fermentation, the first to be produced at this large of a scale. 

Casein is so important as it is the functional dairy protein that gives cheese its stretchy, melty properties. With New Culture producing casein from fermentation, the company is able to make mozzarella with the taste, texture, and nutritional profile of conventional mozzarella but without any animal ingredients. 

That means that it differs from non-dairy cheeses currently available on the market, which instead typically use ingredients like soy, nuts, or vegetable oils to mimic the taste and textures of conventional dairy cheese.

Credit: New Culture

And New Culture's recent milestone brings a nationwide rollout closer than ever, with its new large scale of production reducing product costs by 80 percent. The company projects that within three years its New Culture mozzarella will cost the same as conventional dairy, and will be able to produce more than 14 million pizzas’ worth of cheese.

"Our world-class team at New Culture has solved a string of incredibly complex technical challenges in order to produce our animal-free casein at this scale," said co-founder and CSO, Inja Radman. "We are redefining the boundaries of what's possible in dairy in a way that isn't being done anywhere else."

Making the Dairy Industry Sustainable and Animal-Free

Conventional cheese production requires untenable amounts of water and energy resources. Out of every single food product on the market, cheese requires the most fresh water and the third-most land and greenhouse gas emissions.

But by using fermentation technology, companies like New Culture are able to produce animal-free cheeses that require a fraction of the resources, cutting out the damaging environmental harm generated by factory dairy farming.

Credit: New Culture

"We are entering an era where we can produce massive amounts of real cheese without the involvement of any animals," New Culture’s CEO Matt Gibson says. 

Solving the huge environmental footprint of the conventional global cheese industry, estimated to be worth around $154 billion, is a key component to making the food industry more sustainable and animal-friendly.

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