It is real dairy protein, just not from an animal.

Scientists make it in a lab and it's already being used as an ingredient in cream cheese ice cream and milk.

Unlike plant based alternatives, this protein promises to match the taste and texture of the real deal and without the environmental cost, the sort of target audience isn't people that are perfectly happy with soy milk or almond milk or oat milk.

It's people that just want dairy but has dairy grown in a lab too good to be true or have scientists cracked the code of a cow free future.

The average American consumes an incredible 655 lb of dairy in a year.

It takes 9.4 million cows to fuel that craving, which is bad news for the environment.

Livestock are the largest producers of methane in the US dairy cattle alone make up a quarter of those emissions and animal rights activists say these large farms offer cows only a lifetime of misery for years.

This was the only source of ice cream milk or cheese Alternatives started to take off in the 80s with soy milk leading the charge sales exploded to $550 million dollars in two decades.

This opened the door for almond and oat milks that would soon dominate the dairy free market.

But these come with their own environmental problems.

Almond milk production is notorious for its high water usage.

It takes 23 gallons of water to make just one glass of almond milk that's still less than cow's milk, but far more than oat or soy.

It felt like the only kinds of solutions that people were talking about were yet another plant.

And so until someone came along and found a way to make that functional protein without cows, nothing was gonna change.

And that's exactly what perfect day does in this California lab we're in our bio analytics lab.

This is one of the most important teams in the entire company.

What we're doing is making sure that the protein doesn't have any other sort of behavior that we might not want.

We're actually testing the functionality of the protein.

In actual chemistry.

The protein comes from a process called precision fermentation.

And everyone's familiar with fermentation at least in the context of making beer or wine.

Like you've got these little micro flora and they're eating something like sugar and they're producing something of value for people.

In this case the thing of value is way protein and it's the exact same kind found in cows.

But this version doesn't come from an animal.

The D.

N.

A.

Sequence for way is available online.

So scientists can just download it and they three D.

Print it using vials of synthetic nucleotides.

The chemical compounds that form all genetic material.

It's then mixed with micro flora like fungi.

These micro flora adopt the way D.

N.

A.

And start to multiply next they go into a fermentation tank full of sugar vitamins and minerals and once you add some sugar it's just that simple.

They eat the sugar and convert it into the protein that we care about.

After a couple of days the protein is filtered out and drive.

The science ends when you make the protein.

And from there it's an ingredient like any other that culinary experts are used to working with.

This is where perfect day tests out new recipes.

We started off in Ireland in the summer of 2014 where it was like just us using glass beakers and trying to do whatever we could to having actual culinary experts who really know their art and science ice cream was the first product the company launched technicians combine the protein powder with water, oil, sugar and the desired flavor.

They pour the liquid into the same machines that make regular ice cream.

Which means companies that use the protein don't need any special equipment.

The team is also experimenting with other uses for the protein like this milk.

Mhm.

That creates the perfect film layer for coffee.

Something dairy alternatives have always struggled to mimic.

Perfect Day doesn't sell products under its own name.

Instead it partners with a number of different brands, some of which the company owns like this cream cheese sold under the name Modern Kitchen.

That's already available at a bagel shop just down the street.

No, not even not anymore.

I had heard that Perfect day a few years ago at some foodie event.

I went into it being pretty skeptical and tried it and was just wowed.

Unlike this, tastes like cream cheese, you know, we've had it on the special today and it's been flying, there's been a ton of people buying it before you pay.

If you check the screen, but it's not the easiest product to market.

I'm calling it an animal free and vegan.

But then when we say it has dairy protein, it does cause some confusion.

The spread is technically vegan since it's made without animals, it's also free of the lactose, cholesterol and hormones that are found in cows, Modern Kitchens, cream cheese costs around $5, Roughly?

more than Philadelphia's, it's not really a profit center, I would say for us now, but that's okay to use it as a base cream cheese to replace the conventional, that price would need to come down really far, but hopefully it will as it takes off and the technology scales investments in fermentation based proteins tripled from 2019 to 2020 by the end of that year.

Perfect day alone raised $361 million but it's hard to predict how much lab grown options will disrupt a traditional dairy industry disruption is a big word, right?

So At the moment, plant based dairy is only about 10% of the market And it's taken them decades to get there in 2020 perfect days.

Animal freeway protein was the first in the US to be recognized as safe by the FADA.

The only other places it's currently sold are Singapore and Hong kong.

The challenge is bringing down the price point For them to get to price parity they have to scale.

They're going to need access to manufacturing facilities that are as big as dairy's already using when perfect days ice cream was first released in 2019.

It went for $20 a pint and sold out in less than half a day.

Data does show that people want to Be more sustainable and that they are willing to spend more money to be climate conscious.

But now that the company has scaled up its ice cream falls under the brand brave robot and costs around $5 and Ryan feels there are opportunities even beyond dairy, there might be different food ingredients that might be in materials or even outside of what you and I might think of and that's really where we want to start to move our focus so that we can do a lot more in the future than than just this.