Real dairy proteins. minus the cows: Industry-funded consumer study shows openness to animal-free cheese
The Formo team (picture credit: Formo) A global consumer study funded by ‘animal-free’ dairy startup Formo (previously LegenDairy) suggests consumers are surprisingly open to trying and buying cheese featuring dairy proteins made via microbes instead of cows after reading a detailed description of the technology. However, the authors acknowledge it’s hard to predict how shoppers will respond to such products in real-world settings.
While it s been around for a while, plant-based cheese has only captured a tiny fraction of the market because products still don t deliver for many consumers, who would like to make more sustainable or ethical choices, but aren’t willing to compromise on taste or performance, claim players in the emerging animal-free dairy segment.
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Brave new ‘animal-free’ world: When animal products are no longer made from animals, what do we call them? (And are they vegan?) By Elaine Watson
Picture: GettyImages-Artis777 Thanks to advances in synthetic biology, with the right set of instructions, an army of microscopic little food factories (yeast, fungi, bacteria, algae etc) can now make animal proteins without animals, from collagen and egg albumin to whey protein if you feed them sugar and put them in a fermentation tank. But what do we call them? And are they vegan?
It’s a question that companies in this emerging ‘precision fermentation’ space have been wrestling with since day one (