Milk brand Perfect Day have received $24.7 million in funding to kick-start their vision of cow-free dairy milk. The founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi got invested from Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investment company.
The brand hope to disrupt the dairy industry by creating milk that is dairy, but engineered in a lab and not milked from a cow. The process sees the milk created by using yeast and sugar and fermenting the mixture to create milk.
Temasek have previously invested in other companies who specialize in finding alternative methods to provide meat such as Impossible Foods and vegan leather companies. Co-founder Perumal Gandhi spoke to Food Navigator USA about their unique method and said: “Now we can say we have patented technology, which is really exciting.”
Gandhi added: “I think once we’ve shown this at a commercial scale at super affordable prices, others will come in, but our hope is at that point, we will have such a big head start, we can just license our technology instead of people spending five or six years to try and develop this themselves.”
Originally the aim was to produce a vegan dairy product, but they have since had interest from “some of the most well-known food and dairy companies in the world.” Pandya said: “We’re scaling up production in partnership with another company that brings a lot to bear in terms of experience in everything related to fermentation.
“What we are doing is compatible with industry standards both in terms of fermentation and the various paths to market, as we’re making dairy ingredients that are every bit as functional and nutritious as the proteins we all know and love.”
A preliminary analysis of the environmental impact that Perfect Day and traditional dairy milk has was compared in 2015, and it found that the cellular agriculture used by Perfect Day has the potential to majorly “disrupt the dairy industry,” due to the considerably lower environmental impact.