It’s the New Culture!

Congrats to New Culture on their $25M Series A with food giants ADM and Kraft Heinz: TechCrunch today.

Vegan cheese has been quite disgusting to date. But not the mozzarella that I tasted (photo above).

The missing ingredient has been the casein protein of milk (and until now, it could only be had from milk). Melding innovative microbial fermentation science & traditional cheesemaking, New Culture’s mozzarella is the first animal-free cheese to melt and stretch. When I tasted it, it tasted, smelled, and stretched like milk cheese.

The cheese is healthier (cholesterol and lactose-free) and better for the environment: of all food products, cheese requires the most water (56 gallons/ounce) and is third in greenhouse gas emissions and land use. Producing cheese from casein fermentation rather than animal milk reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and land and water usage by orders of magnitude, making the New Culture approach radically more climate-friendly than animal farming.

More on Casein:
Casein protein is the main dairy protein in cow’s milk and represents around 80% of milk’s protein content. Caseins are actually very unique animal proteins. They have no structure (they look like spaghetti) and they interact in a fascinating way forming micelles. Casein proteins drive the cheesemaking process, as they create the milk curd that most cheeses are made from. Casein also gives dairy cheese its delicious character, including mozzarella’s famous melt and stretch.

Precision fermentation was first used in the cheese industry back in 1990. In the cheesemaking process, the key enzyme that kickstarts the transformation of milk into cheese is called chymosin. Chymosin is naturally found in the stomachs of young ruminants (that’s cows, goats, sheep, and so on). Originally, it was sourced from these animals after they’d been killed. But in the late 1980s, the idea of using microorganisms instead of animals to source cleaner, cheaper chymosin was trialed. It was a huge success. Today, 95% of all cheese is made using chymosin created through microorganism fermentation, rather than sourced from baby animals.

New Culture takes fermentation one step further, to produce the key cheesemaking ingredient: casein protein. They house their microorganisms in fermentation tanks, feed them sugar, and then collect the casein they produce in return.