Agri-tech food start-up Perfect Day just released their genetically modified real “vegan” dairy ice cream made from milk, without harming a single cow.
The company recently launched their vegan ice cream online, selling it for $20 a pint and it sold out in hours. The product comes in three flavors – Vanilla Blackberry Toffee, Salted Vanilla Fudge, and Milky Chocolate.
Perfect Day claims their vegan ice cream delivers the same flavor and texture as its dairy-based counterpart but uses less energy, less water, less land, and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than traditional dairy.
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As we’ve previously reported, the founders of Perfect Day are biochemists Pandya and Perumal Gandhi, who are both vegans. They use flora fermentation to make milk without the cow. To do this, first, they obtained a strain of yeast from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Then, they 3D-printed the DNA sequence from a cow and inserted it into a specific location within the yeast.
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The yeast then creates whey and casein (which are proteins found in cow’s milk) by fermenting sugar. The whey and casein are molecularly identical to the real thing, making the end result completely vegan. Pandya said in a press release about the ice cream:
“What we’re doing here is completely new to the world. We wanted our first debut to be under the care of our own brand so that we could demonstrate the consumer benefits inherent to our protein while starting a conversation about this new approach to making food.”1
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Besides ice cream, Perfect Day also plans to take on dairy-free milk, yogurt, and cheese. Some future products may use Perfect Day, but not the brand’s label, thanks to a partnership with global ingredients giant ADM. Pandya told Food Dive that ADM has the tools and resources to produce the brand’s dairy-free dairy. A few products won’t do — Perfect Day wants to make a positive impact on a global scale.
Perfect Day’s debut vegan ice cream was available online, with a bundle of three costing $60. The first batch was limited to 1,000 pints, and as we mentioned, it sold out in hours.
What are your thoughts about this vegan ice cream? Would you eat it?
