Remilk, founded in 2019, is producing the key functional ingredients of milk using a yeast-based fermentation process. Yeast normally produces ethanol and carbon dioxide during fermentation — qualities used by bakers and brewers for millennia — but it can be modified to produce the components of milk instead.
“Essentially what we’ve been doing, from very early on, is mapping out the different ingredients of milk and finding out what makes milk milk and what makes cheese cheese,” says Remilk’s cofounder and CEO Aviv Wolff.
Tom Dunne, vice-president of European Dairy Farmers, is not a believer in cow-free milk. He commented in the Guardian that lab-grown dairy was “Frankenstein stuff” and “will always be missing something”.
Wolff, who says dairy producers have shown a lot of interest in Remilk’s products, disagrees.
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Wolff is not worried by regulation and consumer resistance — those challenges can easily be overcome, he says. He thinks the biggest challenge for Remilk is scaling up production in a field where traditional dairy producers have had hundreds of years to define the process.
“Precision fermentation is based on low-volume, extremely high-value products. We need to build production facilities and ally with new [commercial] partners to scale. This is the biggest challenge because we see the demand but even in five years’ time, we will not have enough capacity.”
