Can lab-made dairy find its whey into Singaporean hearts?

HOT girls are ditching plant-based milk and choosing cow’s milk for their coffee – a New York waitress made this grand proclamation on Twitter and sent the Internet into a frenzy, with good reason.

In this age of plant-based food fever, we’re inundated with all kinds of marketing on “alt-milk” options – from oat and coconut, to the more exotic pea and even potato milk. It’s refreshing to see some vindication for good ol’ dairy milk.

Don’t get me wrong – I love oat milk lattes and coconut ice cream. But nothing can come close to dairy; it’s creamy, comforting and above all, good for you. Cow’s milk has twice the amount of protein, mainly whey and casein, of oat milk, and is also rich in calcium and minerals that many plant-based options lack.

But to be fair, some people are allergic to the lactose in cow’s milk or avoid it for ethical reasons. What if we could combine the best of the dairy and vegan worlds for this group?

That is what California-based startup Perfect Day is attempting to do with its Very Dairy range of milk, which contains the same protein found in cow’s milk – but not from cows. Or as their tagline goes: cow’s whey, made our way.

I was in the midst of writing about how the Super Group family is making oat milk when I chanced upon ads for Very Dairy on the train. Here was this seeming paradox, that dairy milk could be cow-free. Searching up their website, I was even more taken aback by how the whey protein in Very Dairy is made: in a lab, using a bioengineered form of the fungus Trichoderma reesei.

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What Perfect Day has done is simply to replace cows with the fungus – more broadly known as microflora – as the “production organism”, said Alex Brittain, the company’s senior vice-president.

“We teach the microflora, through bioengineering, to recognise and want to produce dairy protein. We then put the microflora in big steel fermentation tanks – if you could imagine what a pharmaceutical factory looks like,” he explained to me over a call. “In these tanks, we put the microflora in with a food source, which is plant-based carbohydrates, predominantly.”

He continued: “Instead of the cow eating the plant, the microorganisms start to eat the plant, and they basically produce the dairy protein that we’ve taught them to make. This is a liquid mixture that’s filtered and spray-dried. What comes out on the other side is a pure dairy protein, which is identical to the dairy protein from a cow, but there are no cows involved in the process.”

Investors love the idea. In 2021, Perfect Day raised US$350 million co-led by Singapore’s Temasek and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, together with Horizons Ventures and Disney chief Bob Iger. The eight-year-old company also makes ice cream, branded as Coolhaus, with its animal-free whey protein.

Taste test

Singapore is the first Asian market in which Very Dairy launched in January, retailing at supermarkets at S$4.95 for a one-litre carton in plain, strawberry and chocolate flavours. Coolhaus ice cream was launched here six months prior, and has been very well-received by Singaporeans, Brittain said.

I tried Coolhaus’ chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from a supermarket and it was smooth and creamy, pretty much like regular ice-cream. Milk, however, is more complicated.

A taste test of Very Dairy in The Business Times’ office (journalists are always up for free drinks) yielded a surprising range of reactions.

Some colleagues liked the taste, describing it as lighter than regular dairy. One said that she would drink the chocolate flavour of the beverage if she had it in her fridge. But at the other extreme, a few others detested it – in particular the slight fermented aftertaste.

The majority were, like myself, neutral to the taste but found it a little confusing. Attempting to put a finger on the taste, we variously described it as being like “diluted Vitagen”, or the fizzy yoghurt drink Milkis, and somehow also a little like almond jelly. “Maybe it would have been better if there wasn’t the expectation that it’s going to taste like milk,” one colleague commented.

As I relayed these reactions to Brittain, he acknowledged that the taste of cow’s milk is indeed difficult to replicate, with animal fats giving it a distinctive flavour. “But we’re constantly working to improve on the formula,” he said.

With more intensive research and development, perhaps there may come a time when the taste of lab-made milk is identical to that of cow’s milk, paving the way for more brands such as Very Dairy to target the Singapore market.

Will we love lab-made milk as much as our state investor? Will there be a culture war between dairy purists and alt-milk futurists? Will hot girls ask their baristas for new-age dairy? This will be an interesting space to watch.

Lab-made milk is just one of many weird and wonderful phenomena out there that can teach us plenty about the world we live in. Every month, this column will go off tangent from the news and look into more curiosities in various fields, from finance and economics to science and psychology, or even beyond.