SPECIAL:
THE FUTURE EDITION The white stuff T 90
here is a growing demand for dairy substitutes in Australia. According to The Australian Bureau of Statistics, the amount of dairy and meat substitutes purchased from food retailers jumped another 14% in 2020-2021, following
a 14% increase between 2019 to 2020. Consumption of dairy milk substitutes rose 4g per day between 2018 and 2019 and 2020-21, mirroring a 4g per day fall in milk in the same two-year period. Almond milk had a particularly rapid rise, up 31% in the last two years. Soy milk increased by 16% over the same period. Australians will soon have another alternative type of dairy. It has been called synthetic milk and lab-grown milk, but more accurately, precision fermentation is used to brew dairy proteins in a lab to create
Nature identical
Eden Brew co-founder and chief executive Jim Fader explains: “We call it brewed milk, because we use fermentation as the process to brew the proteins. I don’t think synthetic fairly describes the product. The fermentation process we use is close to beer brewing, and we don’t call beer synthetic.” Fader adds, “Milk is 87% water,
3.5% fat, 3.5 % protein, 4% lactose, and a couple percent of other minerals, salts and vitamins. Pretty much every other ingredient in milk, other than the proteins, are easy to buy or emulate. You can even replicate the mouthfeel through plant-based fat. However, you can’t go to another source
to recreate the proteins. It’s recreating the proteins using fermentation that unlocks the ability to make an animal-free milk.” Just like the beer-making process, yeast
Hot on the heels of plant-based milk comes brewed milk, which is in advanced development in Australia. Maida Pineda asks whether this is the future of dairy
a product similar to cow’s milk. Eden Brew and All G Foods are at the forefront of this new technology in Australia.
is used. “We’re programming the yeast to express proteins into a ferment instead of alcohol,” says Fader. “We use synthetic cow DNA to do that. We then run what we call ‘precision fermentation,’ because you have to control temperature and pH very closely. The proteins expressed are nature identical. It’s close to what you find in the cow.” Fader details the process. “Inside the
cow’s tummy, you have two whey proteins and four casein proteins. The four casein proteins tangled together form a structure or casein micelle. Each casein protein will grab some calcium, some phosphorus, and another casein protein. That’s how nature makes the nutrition bioavailable; the micelle takes the nutrition in. If you can get these casein proteins to tangle together when you brew them, then you put all the nutrition in. We can make an animal-free milk just as rich in calcium, phosphorus and nutrition as dairy milk.” All G Foods also uses precision fermentation for their brewed milk. Jan Pacas, founder and CEO of All G Foods says: “In three or four days, you turn 100,000 liters of water and sugar into identical milk.”
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