Podcast: Creating the goodness of milk without the cows

Sanjoy Sanyal
New Ventures Asia
Published in
1 min readMay 25, 2022

You can pick and choose milk ingredients you can make in a cell factory.

Lactoferrin is a protein in human milk, animal milk, and other bodily fluids. Colostrum, the first milk made after a baby is born, is higher in lactoferrin. It is made from whey but only 1–2% of whey protein is lactoferrin.

Getting lactoferrin is resource intensive. It involves dairy (think methane emissions and water use) and then converting large quantities of whey into lactoferrin. Very little quantity of it is available in the market and it is expensive.

TurtleTree is trying to make lactoferrin more available by growing it in microbes. Listen to Fengru Lin, Founder & CEO, TurtleTree, tell you about how microbes can mimic what cows do and lactoferrin can be mixed with other products to make tasty products.

Milks from plant based sources have been around for a long time but here we are talking of developing specific nutritional products based on what you find in food.

“The hardest thing about building a deeptech company is to know how do you explain it to the common masses”

Listen on Anchor, Apple, Google, Spotify and YouTube

Fengru Lin

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Sanjoy Sanyal
New Ventures Asia

Climate finance and climatech innovation expert. Visiting Fellow at the Cambridge Judge Business School. I publish once a fortnight.