Next-generation cheese makers are using precision fermentation and AI to pursue the final frontier in plant-based foods
by Grist
August 23, 2024
In a video uploaded to YouTube last year, home cook and food influencer Alexa Santos scores a wheel of brie, drizzles it with honey, and flips it into a hot cast-iron pan. “Cheese is the main reason why I can’t go vegan,” she explains before baking the cheese with blackberries and hazelnuts and smearing it on slices of baguette.
She was channeling a common sentiment. There are long Reddit threads of would-be vegans confessing their inability to quit cheddar and chèvre. Miyoko Schinner, the founder of the plant-based cheese company Miyoko’s Creamery, said in a recent Netflix documentary series that she hears that kind of thing often. “It’s so interesting about cheese that people can’t give it up,” she said.
I get it, because I’m one of those people. How on earth are we supposed to ditch the most carbon-intensive form of dairy in the face of melty pots of fondue and snowy piles of grated Parmesan?
Try as though cheese lovers might, it’s hard to ignore the environmental toll of cheese. Among major food products, its climate footprint trails only red meat and farmed shrimp. It’s emissions intensive because of the methane that dairy cows belch into the air, and also because cheese is a concentrated product — it takes 10 pounds of fresh milk, on average, to produce one pound of cheese, with hard cheeses like Parmigiano Reggiano requiring more milk than soft kinds like ricotta. Cheese is also crazily water intensive, using 516 gallons for each pound, because dairy cows feed on thirsty crops like alfalfa. Meanwhile, Americans have doubled their cheese intake since the early 1980s, largely in the form of pizza. Taking a bite out of America’s dairy cheese consumption would have meaningful environmental savings — but so far, there’s never been any real sign that possibility could be on the horizon.
Until now. For the first time, two alternative cheese makers are touting plant-based cheese convincing enough to win over even committed dairy fanatics.
One is New Culture, a San Francisco-based startup using precision fermentation to make a cow-less mozzarella that will debut later this year at the Michelin-starred Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. New Culture hopes to create a new category of “animal-free” cheese that can eventually put traditional dairy out to pasture. Inja Radman, co-founder and chief science officer at New Culture, said, “We’re very convinced we can eventually fully displace animal-derived cheese.”
The other is Climax Foods, which uses machine learning to identify plant ingredients that can recreate the flavors and textures of blue cheese, feta, brie, and chèvre. The Berkeley-based company, founded by veteran data scientist Oliver Zahn, has big ambitions. A 2022 press release was headlined with the claim that Climax is “[taking] on the $800 billion dairy market” by matching conventional cheese bite for bite. Michelin-starred chefs have praised the faux cheeses — one of which was on its way to a stunning upset victory over dairy wedges at the annual Good Food Awards this spring when it was disqualified at the eleventh hour for still-opaque reasons. The Washington Post compared the vegan cheese’s near-triumph to the 1976 Judgment of Paris — the blind taste test where California wines prevailed over French pours, shocking the wine world.
This level of buzz and ambition may be new for fake cheese, but it’s not the first time alt-proteins have tried to win over omnivores. Past efforts have included notable successes like the Swedish oat milk brand Oatly and failures like the McPlant burger, a collaboration between McDonalds and Beyond Meat that the fast-food giant axed in the United States after a test rollout bombed with customers. The trials and tribulations of past alt-meat and dairy companies have made the industry wiser to what does and doesn’t make omnivores put substitutes on their plates. As Climax and New Culture eye spots on cheese boards, they’re taking cues and heeding lessons from faux food’s past.
The campaign to make alt proteins appealing to everyone is about a decade old, counting from the launch of the Impossible and Beyond burgers, both of which promised to mimic meat in ways past veggie burgers couldn’t. Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, said in 2015 that his company’s line of meatless fare would replace animal products by 2035, a prediction that feels ambitious today, given that dollar sales of plant-based meat and seafood are just 1 percent of those of their animal-based counterparts.
Yet the race to take fake meat mainstream is still very much on. The past couple of years have been marked by product reformulations meant to entice a wider variety of eaters: Beyond has leaned healthier, Impossible has veered more “indulgent,” veggie-burger pioneer MorningStar Farms has gone “steakhouse style.”
Vegan cheese companies, too, have been making more overtures to non-vegans in recent years. Violife, one of the more recognizable plant-based cheese brands, launched a campaign in 2022 encouraging flexitarians to change their cheese for the planet’s sake. Daiya, another brand found in many supermarkets, revamped its cheeses last year to be more cheese-like and unveiled a new brand meant to be more flexitarian-friendly. Yet the market for vegan cheese, like that of fake meat, is still just 1 percent of the size of the dairy cheese market by dollar sales — and it’s been sitting at that level for three years running.
Granted, vegan cheese hasn’t received the level of investment that fake meat has, but it also has a mass-adoption advantage it hasn’t yet cashed in on, according to Brian Kateman, co-founder and president of the Reducetarian Foundation. He points out that since lactose intolerance is common (more than a third of Americans struggle to digest the dairy protein) there’s something of a built-in market for alt dairy — but the path has been easier for fake milk. Plant-based milk, which boasts 17 percent the dollar sales of regular milk, just isn’t “the star of the dish” the way fake meat is, he reasons, adding that “cheese is kind of somewhere in the middle.”
If there’s one thing that’s become clear in the alt-food world over the past decade, it’s that taste trumps everything. According to a 2023 survey by the Food Industry Association, it’s the biggest reason eaters either bail on plant-based foods or come back to them after they’ve tried them once.
The problem, as Kateman puts it, is that “historically, vegan cheese has sucked.” Faux cheeses generally fall into two camps. There are the hyper-processed kinds made of oil and starch that dissolve into goo when heated and, in especially soul-crushing cases, stick to your teeth like glue. And then there are the more artisan faux cheeses, often made of fermented nut milks, which can taste good if you judge them on their own merits but would never be mistaken for actual dairy.
Past vegan cheeses “were not functional,” said Radman, of New Culture. “They were not tasty.”
Climax and New Culture are aiming to close vegan cheese’s vast taste gap with different technologies.
New Culture’s involves using precision fermentation to grow casein, a dairy protein found in milk that Radman said is “the holy grail” for making cheese stretch, ooze, and melt when heated. The process involves training microbes to produce the dairy protein in a lab so that cows don’t have to. Other types of precision fermentation are already used in a variety of foods: Artificial flavors like vanillin, the vitamins added to cereal, and the rennet used in most dairy cheese are all precision-fermented. New Culture rounds out its recipe with water, plant-based fats, salt, sugar, vitamins, and minerals. (The company won’t reveal what those plant-based fats are until they launch, but Radman said they’re ingredients people could find in their kitchens.)
Precision fermentation is not a new technique in the plant-based world: Impossible Foods brews plant-derived heme to make its fake meat bleed. That’s just one of the ways New Culture sees Impossible Foods as a role model. Radman said she thinks staying focused on nailing just one product first, as Impossible did with its burger, is a smart approach. And she’s not the only one: Entrepreneurs and writers have been calling for plant-based meats and dairy to do less and do it better. For Impossible, the combination of a focused start and a precision-fermented recipe was enough to put it at the front of the meatless flavor pack. A 2023 study found that in both blind and informed taste tests, eaters preferred the Impossible Burger not just over the Beyond Burger, but over actual beef, too — even though most blind tasters could tell it wasn’t meat.
So is New Culture the long-awaited Impossible Burger of cheese? Nancy Silverton, the James Beard Award-winning chef behind Pizzeria Mozza, the restaurant that’s debuting New Culture, said it’s better. She doesn’t think vegan substitutes should require making “an excuse. And I think that happened in the world of those Impossible meats and things like that,” she said. “I personally didn’t think they were great.” New Culture’s animal-free mozzarella, on the other hand? Silverton calls it “stellar.” It’s the first vegan cheese she’s ever put on the menu at any of her restaurants.
A big part of her assessment comes down to texture. Unlike past nut-based cheeses, Silverton said, New Culture’s mozzarella melts smoothly, and has “that little bit of stretch, kind of that creaminess” that you want on pizza. The one thing it’s missing compared to dairy cheese, she notes, is the milky flavor that lactose would provide. “But you get all the other satisfying parts of a mozzarella.” (Since New Culture’s mozzarella hasn’t been released yet, I didn’t get a chance to taste it myself.)
If New Culture’s path toward convincing vegan cheese literally starts with casein, Climax’s works backward from the magic ingredient. The company, which launched in 2020, uses an advanced algorithm to sift through data on plant-based proteins and fats to find combinations that can mimic the characteristics of dairy milk. Given the vast biodiversity in the plant kingdom, Zahn said, “It’s completely crazy to think that casein is the only protein that melts and stretches under heat exposure.” He said there’s been a big assumption in the plant-based food world that you either have to grow identical versions of animal-derived ingredients in a lab, or iterate on plant-based recipes manually. Artificial intelligence can accelerate the latter approach, he said — although Climax employs a team of cheese makers to vet ingredients and test recipes.
Climax’s four cheeses are made with ingredients like legumes, seeds, and plant oils. Last year, the company inked a deal with the Bel Group, the maker of Laughing Cow and Boursin, to help the cheese giant reformulate its vegan line.
Climax’s blue cheese and feta, both of which I tried at home, are astonishing for cheese made from plants. The feta tasted exactly like the real deal. The blue, whose top three ingredients are organic pumpkin seeds, organic coconut oil, and lima beans, was very close; it got me at first with its sharp tang and characteristic crumbliness. There were two minor giveaways, however: It wasn’t as rich and fatty as a dairy blue, and the texture got slightly gritty when it warmed up in my AC-less kitchen. But would I notice the difference if it were served in a Waldorf salad like the one it featured in last fall at Eleven Madison Park? Doubtful.
Launching in restaurants, as Climax did last year and New Culture will do later this year at Pizzeria Mozza, is a familiar path in the alt-protein world that can give products a foodie halo. Oatly launched its barista blend in 2017 in coffee shops, letting baristas make the case that discerning drinkers order oat milk — a move that fueled the alt-milk brand’s rapid rise. Impossible Foods first sold its patties at David Chang’s now-closed Momofuku Nishi, which created buzz and acted as a Michelin-starred vote of confidence that meatless burgers really could hold their own next to shoestring fries. Chef endorsements are probably doubly important for fake cheese, since people know it today as disappointing goop.
Zahn, who used to work for Impossible Foods, hopes Climax will distinguish itself from past vegan cheeses with its high protein content, notably lacking in many of the oil-and-starch-based fake cheeses that pepper grocery store shelves. He also hopes its branding will stand out. He said the branding of past alt protein companies, “especially in the beginning, was very tech-bro-ish,” signaling no emotion or culture. It’s why he chose the name Climax.
“I wanted to sound deeply humane and something people really can identify with,” he explains, citing the idea of culmination expressed by the Greek root of the word. (Whether the sexual connotations of the name appeal to or alienate customers remains to be seen.)
Revamping how vegan protein brands talk to omnivores has been a topic of discussion in the industry recently. Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Impossible Foods, told Bloomberg TV in June that he thinks plant-based food “launched incorrectly,” leading with too much morality. In the beginning, he said, “It was very climate, it was very zealot, there was a lot of rhetoric, it was very anti-cattle industry.” One element of what he said echoed what Ethan Brown, the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, told The New York Times in 2021: Climate just doesn’t sell. Radman agrees, and said New Culture’s marketing, when it eventually enters the retail space, will be more about food than climate.
Neither Climax nor New Culture has released a life cycle assessment — a detailed study that measures the environmental impact of foods and other products — though both companies said they plan to. New Culture’s preliminary in-house analysis suggests their animal-free mozzarella uses less than 5 percent of the water and land of its dairy-based counterpart, and produces less than 20 percent of the carbon emissions. Previous studies have estimated that other vegan cheeses produce anywhere between 2 percent and 49 percent the emissions of animal-derived cheeses.
Foodie vibes are unlikely to sway mainstream eaters if fake cheeses aren’t affordable. Beside taste, price parity is the other white whale that meat and dairy substitutes have been chasing. Bruce Friedrich, founder and president of the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes alternative meat and dairy, wrote on X last year that until those two bars are met, “the theory of change has not been tried” for meatless meat. Kateman said taste and affordability are the most crucial factors to get people to buy vegan cheese, too.
Last year, plant-based cheese was about 30 percent more expensive than conventional cheese on a per-unit basis, according to Daniel Gertner, a business analyst at the Good Food Institute, though he cautions that more data is needed to draw a complete picture of the price difference.
Both New Culture and Climax say they’ll eventually beat dairy cheese on price as they scale. Climax’s blue cheese is so far available directly to consumers only through the Bay Area grocery delivery service Good Eggs for $2.88 per ounce — comparable to the high end of artisan wedges.
But Zahn is resolute that skipping the cow — which he sees as a wasteful middleman between plant ingredients and cheese makers — will make cheese from plants the more affordable option in the end. “I wouldn’t be in this business and taking an enormous pay cut over staying at Google or something if I didn’t believe we could change the world,” he said. “And I would be crazy to think we could change the world if our products couldn’t be cheaper.”
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This article by Grist is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now (CCN).
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This article was originally published on IMPAKTER. Read the original article.