<\/p>\n
The vegan food market was pegged as a $27 billion industry last year, a figure that\u2019s expected to more than double within a decade. This hasn\u2019t gone unnoticed by the major food and beverage incumbents such as Nestl\u00e9, which launched a plant-based dairy line under the Wunda brand last year, while rival Unilever has been doubling down on its vegan offerings.<\/p>\n
But any company looking to develop successful plant-based food alternatives often face challenges when trying to replicate certain goods traditionally made from animal-based ingredients. Dairy, in particular, has its problems, as recreating the \u201ccreaminess\u201d without using real cream isn\u2019t easy \u2014 and existing dairy-free solutions such as coconut oil or palm oil aren\u2019t all that sustainable from an environmental standpoint.<\/p>\n
This is something that Swiss startup Cultivated Biosciences is setting out to solve, through creating something akin to high-fat cream using a GMO-free yeast fermentation process.<\/p>\n
Founded out of Zurich in 2021 by Tomas Turner and Dimitri Zogg, Cultivated Biosciences is one of countless companies working in a sustainable food space that\u2019s working to reduce humans\u2019 dependency on animals for sustenance, spanning everything from chicken and seafood, to sausages. Dairy is also garnering significant attentions from entrepreneurs and investors the world over, with the likes of Brown Foods recently raising cash to develop cell-cultured \u201ccowless\u201d milk in a lab, while Better Dairy and New Culture are using precision fermentation techniques to help provide the necessary milk proteins lacking in other dairy-free alternatives.<\/p>\n
Cultivated Biosciences, for its part, is tackling the problem from a slightly different angle \u2014 it\u2019s focusing squarely on the \u201ctexture\u201d to help vegan food producers create goods that \u201cfeel\u201d closer to the real McCoy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are working on the fat and surrounding microstructure component that give dairy its amazing mouthfeel,\u201d CEO Tomas Turner explained to . \u201cWe have developed a fat-rich ingredient that you can imagine as a 20% fat cream, with a mouthfeel and colour indistinguishable from dairy.\u201d<\/p>\n