US – Perfect Day Foods, a California-based food technology startup making whey and casein proteins using precision fermentation, is continuing to expand its footprint in animal-free products by investing both in India and US.
The biotechnology leader that developed the world’s first animal-free milk protein is accelerating its ability by opening New Enterprise Biology Hub in Salt Lake City.
The BioHive hub is a nearly 60,000-square-foot space, featuring commercial and laboratory space which will serve as Perfect Day’s second United States location in addition to the one in Berkeley.
The expansion to Salt Lake City is in partnership with the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity (Go Utah) for an EDTIF tax credit last year.
Perfect Day is also expanding in India with a liquidation buy-off of Mumbai-based Sterling Biotech, acquiring two manufacturing plants in Gujarat and another in Tamil Nadu.
Perfect Day Foods produces animal-free milk from flora using whey protein made by microflora, not cows, to make dairy that is identical to traditional milk through precision fermentation.
Precision fermentation creates useful products by combining microflora’s natural ability to turn sugars into other materials with the modern tools of biology.
The specific organism(microflora) the company uses is a multicellular, filamentous fungus, which means it has a branching structure that enables it to rapidly expand into its environment and capture any available resources using those prolific digestive enzymes.
The company’s technology leverages the cow’s genetic potential by harmlessly taking the genes that allow cows to produce casein and whey (the primary proteins in milk), incorporating them into bacteria or fungi (microflora), and then fermenting them so that they produce milk proteins, much like cows do.
Perfect Day uses this same kind of fermentation to co-opt microflora’s natural inclination to make energy, and repurpose it to produce almost complex organic molecules like animal-free dairy proteins.
According to Perfect Day Foods, 90% of cheese made in the United States uses fermentation-produced chymosin, the major enzyme in rennet responsible for that curdling action.
Precision fermentation is majorly used in the food industry to make vitamins and flavors while in the medical industry, to make life-saving insulin and antibiotics.
An ISO-compliant, third-party reviewed life cycle assessment (LCA) found that Perfect Day’s whey protein reduces blue water consumption by up to 99%, greenhouse gas emissions by up to 97%, and non-renewable energy use by up to 60%, compared to conventional production methods, according to Perfect Day.
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