A startup that makes cultured mozzarella and ricotta cheeses without cows has raised record funding from investors looking to tap the growing market for environmentally sustainable dairy alternatives.
Precision fermentation technology relies on microbes to create proteins that form the basis of cheeses.
“What our products contain are the actual milk proteins, but we don’t get them from a cow,” said Britta Winterberg, Formo’s co-founder and chief scientific officer. “We get them from our micro-organisms.”
For more on this evolution now unfolding in more efficient food production, see the latest ReThinkx report on food and agriculture, here’s a taste:
We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals ten thousand years ago. This is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute – more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.
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