Silicon Valley Startup Launches Dairy Ice Cream Made Without Cows
This first-of-its-kind, vegan-friendly ice cream is made with real cow’s-milk proteins that do not come from actual cows! Silicon Valley technology startup Perfect Day has taken innovation to a new level, creating milk proteins (casein and whey) that are nutritionally identical to those taken from a cow.
Eager customers can now go to Perfect Day’s website and purchase pints of vanilla salted fudge, milky chocolate, and vanilla blackberry toffee from the 1,000-pint limited batch. On its website the company explains that its products are real dairy made without factory farms, hormones, lactose, or cows—not to mention unsafe cholesterol and pathogens.
Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi, biomedical engineers with a shared vegan lifestyle, were accepted into the tech incubator IndieBio in 2014. There they began developing whey and casein without the use of a cow. According to Perfect Day, this is done by “taking milk’s essential genes” and adding them to “microflora—a tiny organism that comes from nature and can produce large amounts of pure protein.” Microflora are already used to make items like vitamins and probiotics.
Without getting too technical, the end result is a “tasteless base” that can be used to make traditional dairy products.
While this incredible innovation could help spare countless cows and reduce the environmental impact of dairy production, Pandya and Gandhi foresee their product also helping countries forced to import dairy products (such as island nations). Pandya explained:
One of the most exciting things we’re working on is the ability to establish domestic dairy production in these regions, which we envision could bring a ton of benefits to the world: cutting down on the emissions related to shipping so much dairy around, helping countries achieve protein independence, and perhaps, most importantly, addressing how we can make high-quality protein in an uncertain climate future.
Perfect Day strives to have the biggest impact by encouraging food and dairy companies to simply swap out the old cow-based dairy protein for the new flora-based dairy protein. Because the animal-free version has the exact same food functionality, companies will be able to reach a broader audience and improve sustainability without sacrificing texture and taste.
This fantastic new development is sure to rattle the already-nervous dairy industry as milk sales continue their decades-long decline. In Wisconsin, low milk prices are leading to bankruptcies, and dairy farmers are leaving the industry at a rate of three a day.
Join the growing number of people enjoying plant-based dairy by ordering your FREE Vegetarian Starter Guide today, and don’t forget to snag a few pints from Perfect Day before they run out.