DairyX makes breakthrough advancement in cow-free casein

Dive Brief:

• Israeli food tech company DairyX Foods this week announced a major advancement in its mission to make dairy milk without cows. 
• The company has developed a method to produce casein products that can self assemble into micelles — the “primary building blocks of dairy products,” such as cheese and yogurt, it said. 
• In conjunction with its proprietary method, Dairy X has refined a technology to enhance the gelation of its casein micelles, which will enable manufacturers to produce firm, stretchy and creamy products using their traditional dairy-making processes.

Dive Insight:

Casein micelles are key to giving dairy products the smooth and creamy texture they are conventionally known for. 

Many dairy-free manufacturers use additives and emulsifiers to achieve that familiarity consumers are looking for, but this often sacrifices the “clean-label” factor of a product. 

DairyX’s precision fermentation technology uses microorganisms — specifically yeast — to produce smart casein proteins. 

“Not all caseins produced using precision fermentation are alike,” said Maya Bar-Zeev, head of product development and downstream processing at DairyX in a statement. “We trained yeast to produce the next generation of casein.”

The company’s new technology has the potential to eliminate the need for additives in plant-based dairy products, as well as make such products more affordable, according to the statement. 

DairyX is creating yeast strains that rapidly produce large quantities of casein. The product can be used as a direct replacement for milk by dairy manufacturers without requiring any changes to their tools or processes, avoiding the need to adapt production facilities, according to the company.

NewMoo, also an Israeli-based, in May created a plant molecular farming platform that produces casein in agricultural plant seeds. French company Standing Ovation is currently working to produce fermentation-derived casein on an industrial scale, and California-based New Culture was granted a Generally Recognized as Safe status earlier this year for its fermentation-derived casein product.