In a nondescript chemistry lab in the heart of Toronto, a dedicated cabal of scientists may have arrived at the answer to a problem that has long been the bane of many a sustainable eater’s existence.
Although modern technology has come up with solid, cruelty-free dupes for a host of animal-sourced options — oat milk, mung bean eggs, the sorcery that transforms peas, soy, yeast, fat and beets into a grill-worthy burger — a decent plant-based pizza cheese has proved far more elusive.
I’ve been a vegan for a decade and a half, and while there have been some promising contenders — Pizzeria Libretto’s house-made fior di latte chief among them — finding a credible vegan analogue to the gooey, stretchy mozzarella found atop every traditional pie has been, with apologies to Michael Pollan, an herbivore’s dilemma.
After four years of trial and error, the food technology startup AuX Labs has developed a method to produce casein — one of two primary proteins in cow milk — without using animals.
In conventional cheesemaking, the melty, stretchy quality is created by combining casein with acids or enzymes that cause the protein to coagulate. AuX uses a gene editing process called precision fermentation to incorporate the exact genetic code for casein into the genome of a microbe like yeast.
When the yeast is fermented, it expresses a protein that’s molecularly identical to the casein in cow milk.
Combine that protein with water and other ingredients (AuX isn’t disclosing the precise formulation), and voilà — a guilt-free dairy-free dairy product perfect for a grilled cheese or a pizza.
According to founder and CEO Ted Jin, during the company’s taste tests, “the majority of our consumers couldn’t differentiate our cheese from conventional dairy.”
Jin, who previously worked in brand management at Procter and Gamble and Pepsi, founded AuX in 2022. The cheese industry, he saw, was ripe for disruption.
Cheese represents a $200-billion (U.S.) plus global market, but it’s also environmentally destructive, high in saturated fat and salt, and increasingly expensive.
And, while non-dairy alternatives have radically improved in recent years — long gone is the rubbery, waxy faux fromage of yore — they have yet to really move the needle on consumer behaviour.
Developing an animal-free product that looked, acted and tasted exactly the same as its conventional cousin — at a potentially lower price point — could solve all these problems at once.
“I want to help build a better food system for my kids,” Jin says, “one where sustainable, healthy and affordable food is the norm rather than the exception.”
AuX isn’t the only company to make casein this way — the technology’s been around for a decade — but it’s the first in Canada trying to do so on an industrial scale. A core challenge is obtaining sufficient microorganisms to make casein at a volume that could eventually displace conventional cheese.
Jin’s solution? Partner with food and alcohol companies, particularly microbreweries.
The explosion in craft beer over the last several years has led to vast fermentation and manufacturing infrastructure across the continent, but also a saturation of the market and excess capacity.
Jin intends to partner with those brewers, providing them with an additional revenue source while AuX gains access to their equipment.
“Our path to commercial scale is faster and more capital-efficient than approaches that require bespoke facilities,” he says. The plan has tantalized investors; in April, the company closed a $4-million funding round that Jin says will “fast-track” commercialization, allowing AuX to ramp up manufacturing, expand the team and pursue partnerships.
Culture club: Making milk in a test tube
Like AuX, Opalia Foods is making cow-free dairy, but rather than focusing on a single protein, the company is aiming to make whole milk itself.
Opalia was founded in 2020 by entrepreneurs (and vegans) Jennifer Côté and Lucas House, who felt that existing dairy alternatives would never compel enough people to give up the real thing to make a difference to the planet. The answer, they felt, could be cellular agriculture, in which cells derived from animals are used to grow tissue.
Researchers have been experimenting with cellular meat and seafood for years, but lab-grown milk seems likely to arrive on grocery-store shelves sooner.
Opalia’s technique, which the company has honed over the last half-decade, consists of five main steps: mammary cells are harvested from a cow udder and then frozen; the cells are thawed, then added to a specialized bioreactor where they grow in a cocktail of sugars, salts and an animal-free fetal bovine serum (FBS); the FBS is removed and lactation hormones are added; cells actively produce milk; the milk is harvested, purified and dried.
A common component in animal cell culture, FBS is usually harvested from bovine fetuses taken from pregnant cows during slaughter. Opalia’s chief innovation is to use a proprietary, engineered substrate that involves no animals and, according to the co-founders, is cheaper.
In April, Opalia closed its own $3.2-million seed round. Over the next 24 months, that funding will allow the company to dramatically scale its production.
“We’ve validated pretty much all of the process at lab scale,” says Coté, “and now we’re basically building out our bioreactors.”
As that happens, the company’s partnerships with both Hoogwegt (the world’s largest private supplier of dairy ingredients) and a major Canadian industry player (Coté can’t yet say who), are allowing the company to do more comprehensive R&D.
“It’s exciting because we’re seeing milk being produced that we can actually taste and play with,” says Coté. Once the company gets through regulatory approvals — about a year from now, she estimates — consumers should be able to taste it too.
Spilling the beans on a cheaper alternative
University of Guelph food science professor Alejandro Marangoni is watching both companies with cautious optimism. (One of his former students, Laura Hanley, works at AuX.)
Five years ago, his lab set out to develop a better plant-based cheese, and after experimenting with various ingredients and processes, they devised a product that contained an unusually high amount of protein and achieved that elusive stretch and melt.
“We solved the problem,” Marangoni says. But at the time, the lab had an exclusive arrangement with a leading Canadian vegan cheese company, and according to Marangoni, the company only adopted the part of the formulation that provided better stretch, forgoing the added protein because it was too expensive to be commercially viable.
“They didn’t have the stomach,” he says, “to come up with a really innovative product.”
Cost remains the biggest obstacle when it comes to making high-quality vegan cheese a reality, Marangoni argues. This is partly because of ingredients — protein isolate is expensive, he says — but also because the potential $3.5-billion (U.S.) market only amounts to a tiny fraction of what people spend on regular cheese.
While he thinks both AuX and Opalia hold great promise, he’s not yet convinced that the companies will be able to compete with conventional dairy on price.
But Marangoni may have his own solution to that problem.
Of late, his lab has been experimenting with legumes to produce a novel dairy-free product that, he says, also faithfully simulates ordinary cheese. While not quite as nutritionally dense as earlier iterations, the new stuff is still “protein rich,” easy to make and far more economical, as Marangoni points out: “Come on, beat the price of some cooked beans.”
Already, he’s been in touch with bean producers in Southwestern Ontario who are keen to try their hand at cheese-making. The idea’s not far-fetched; at least one Canadian company, Earth’s Own, has been selling cream cheese and butter substitutes for years, using butter beans as a primary ingredient.
But, just as with regular cheese, variety is the spice of life. With innovation coming from all these different quarters at once, a whole array of delicious animal-free dairy may soon be available to discerning diners.
“The measure of success is practical,” says AuX Labs’ Jin. “If we deliver cheese that performs the same way, at competitive prices, at scale, the transition happens because it makes sense, not because we’ve asked anyone to accept a compromise.”
