The Case for Casein

Cheese goes high tech in 2022

Brad Pruente

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Published in

Prime Movers Lab

6 min readJul 20, 2022

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Every year consumers spend around $80B on cheese [1]. That’s a lot of pizzas, quesadillas, and wine and cheese nights. You may have heard that some moderation is in order for the sake of your waistline, but cheese also exacts a toll on the planet. I’ve outlined some of the negative impacts that animal agriculture has in some of my past blog posts about fungi and cultivated seafood. Some estimates attribute 1–2% of CO2 emissions to dairy production — more than air travel. [2] Luckily for consumers, startups are turning their attention to this market so we can have our cheese and eat it too.

Cheese has been a part of human diets for thousands of years. [3, 4] It has a simple ingredient list that belies a complex chemical process that separates mozzarella, cheddar, and Swiss. In fact, you can make mozzarella easily at home in an afternoon with ingredients on Amazon and the grocery store.

What’s wrong with “normal” cheese?

The problem with cheese is, in one sense, nothing, and in another sense, everything. The wonderful and awful part of our food system is its industrial scale. It makes food cheap and accessible, but it also means that its externalities are equally industrial-sized. Fundamentally, dairy is a huge market and is eaten all over the world, so “better cheese” would be a huge market. There are a few specific problems that many entrepreneurs feel passionately about solving.

Industrial animal agriculture is bad for the environment.

Cows have a greenhouse gas problem. If we could make cheese without cows (or sheep or goats), we could substantially reduce the methane and CO2 impact of the product. Animal agriculture also contributes to deforestation, water use and pollution, and ethical issues around the treatment of animals.

2. Antibiotic resistance

Approximately 70% of medically important antibiotics sold in the US are used for animals. [5] While animals are certainly treated for disease, it is common to administer antibiotics prophylactically to boost growth. This contributes to antibiotic resistance and makes the drugs less effective when they are needed to fight infection.

3. Lactose Intolerance

Many people are lactose intolerant. This condition affects approximately 65% of people to varying degrees. [6] New methods of making cheese open up the possibility of making cheese without lactose.

4. Performance

Vegan cheeses have been sold commercially for several years and are already part of this transition. The products on the market today are generally produced with some sort of milk alternative, like soy, nut, or coconut. If you’ve tried them you may have noticed that the experience doesn’t perfectly imitate “regular” cheese. Vegan cheeses aren’t quite “cheesy” enough to many people. Often, vegan cheeses don’t have the same performance properties as animal cheese, for instance, they don’t always have the stringiness we associate with pizza cheese.

Why now?

Startups approach this area with multiple tools in their tool kits. As they scale, they aim to increase their yields by optimizing their bioprocess, their organism, or both. A collection of innovations have converged to make New Cheese a technological possibility.

First, the ability to read, write, and edit DNA with tools like CRISPR-Cas9 makes modifying organisms easier and cheaper than it has been in the past. Second, cell-free biology allows faster iteration cycles, more precise control of reactions, and less “background noise” than would occur in a full cycle system. Third, advanced biosensors make testing faster and cheaper and speed up feedback loops. Fourth, advanced AI and machine learning algorithms help companies aim their R&D more accurately.

How do they do it?

Dozens of companies have been founded in the last several years to make animal-free cheese that is identical to the original. Milk makes up the majority of cheese by volume so many companies are starting there. Of course, this means they can target other dairy products as well, like ice cream, yogurt, or just sell milk itself. Other companies are trying to make casein. Caseins are a class of proteins that are important in cheese production and are found in milk. These companies fall into two broad camps, fermentation using yeast or bacteria and molecular farming.

Fermentation is an ancient process and underpins the cheesemaking process. Precision fermentation takes this a step further by “teaching” microbes like yeast or bacteria to make compounds like casein that are commercially valuable. This allows us to produce products that are identical to their animal-agriculture counterparts without the use of animals. In the past, we had to raise cows or sheep or goats and milk them. Today, startups aim to produce the same milk, identical in every way, from yeast or bacteria.

A second approach is molecular farming. Molecular farming is a technique that uses plants as “factories” to produce valuable proteins. Once the plants have matured, they can be harvested and processed to refine the protein in a process that is similar, at least conceptually, to how we use wheat to produce flour. One of the benefits of this approach is that it sidesteps some of the hurdles to scaling production. That is, we already grow and harvest many crops on an industrial scale.

Remaining Challenges

Replacing the ruminants in the dairy industry is still an aspiration and faces several obstacles.

Cost and Scale

Cost and scale are perhaps the greatest challenges to be solved and are closely linked. They can be broken down into several sub-categories. Fundamentally, there is a lack of capacity to produce alternative proteins. We need more, larger, tanks. Fermentation processes continue to improve. The faster the microbes can produce, the cheaper the end product will be. Companies can also increase concentrations (titers), which means they can produce more product in every production cycle.

Entrepreneurs work on improving both the fermentation process itself, as well as the host organism. Startups are beginning to appear that specialize in optimizing this pathway, essentially CDMOs aimed at the foodtech sector.

Regulatory Approval

Governments and regulatory bodies need to allow the products for sale. Precision fermentation has been used to make insulin for years and companies can apply to the FDA for Generally Recognizable as Safe (GRAS) approval to sell in the US. A standardized process helps companies efficiently demonstrate safety and get to market. Earlier this year, Remilk announced that it earned GRAS status and that it can begin selling its dairy products in the US. [7] The Novel Foods Application in Europe can take many months, delaying a company’s ability to begin commercial sales.

Consumer Acceptance

Consumer attitudes are a difficult issue to predict and it is reasonable to assume that people will have different opinions. GMOs, for instance, have been produced for 30 years and are widely used but many consumers aren’t aware that they are on the market. [8]

Incumbents

These new technologies are not without their detractors. The food industry is attacking them, adopting a playbook similar to the one used against plant-based meat alternatives and nut milks. A recent article by Green Queen highlighted a campaign by the Non-GMO Project that aims to turn consumers against “milk 2.0”. It’s worth pointing out that precision fermentation milk is not required to be labeled as GMO because the technology modifies the microbes, not the milk or casein or whey.

Bottom Line

Any food product has to satisfy two critical criteria in order to grow to the size venture capital firms find attractive. First, it must be cost-competitive. The world’s first lab-grown burger famously cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. [9] It’s hard to find lots of buyers at that price point. Second, and most importantly, a food must taste great. Fermentation-derived casein enables animal-free cheese that looks, feels, and tastes identical to “old cheese” and does it more economically. That’s a win for the planet and the pocketbook, if not the waistline.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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The Case for Casein

Cheese goes high tech in 2022

Written by Brad Pruente