Call to heed the rise of animal-free dairy products

• Published date: 13 April 2022
• Publication title: Central Rural Life

Will a moo still do

Food technologist Anna Benny believes it is possible — and probable — that commercial scale, functional replicas of dairy ingredients made without animals will become commonplace within the next 10 years.

Rather than being produced by a dairy cow — a familiar scene in New Zealand’s rural countryside — they would be grown via cellular agriculture, produced with precision fermentation or isolated from plants.

This is high-tech stuff; forget curdled soy milk in the morning cup of tea, or hard, dry burgers created from mashed chickpeas.

Mrs Benny says the world has moved on and she believes ‘‘alternative protein’’ will be a term consigned to the past.

A deep understanding of foods at a molecular level and how that influenced function and flavour was bringing appealing products to the market, whether it was a vege burger that ‘‘bleeds’’ or icecream made with animal-free dairy protein, she said.

And it was no longer just protein in the spotlight; new technologies could replicate fats and other components of animal products.

Animal ingredients were being reverse engineered to be made from non-animal sources.

Alternative protein had not affected New Zealand’s primary industries in any major way so far, Mrs Benny said.

Risk was often considered in relation to the meat industry but it was dairy that was the ‘‘low-hanging fruit’’ for alternatives.

Meat was complex as it had many structural, textural and inconsistent aspects, making it very complicated to replicate successfully.

In contrast, milk was a homogenous product; it was always a liquid consisting of 87% water and 13% solids.

There were three ways milk alternatives were produced:

■Plant-based— utilising ingredients such as soy, nuts or oats combined with water to produce a milk-like substance.

■Precision fermentation — programming micro-organisms such as yeast to produce molecules such as proteins, fats and vitamins, then combining these to produce a milk product or replicate dairy ingredients.

■Cell culturing — taking existing milk-producing (mammary) cells, culturing them to increase their number, then using these to produce milk outside the body of a mammal.

Alternative dairy, especially precision fermentation, represented a ‘‘significant risk’’ to the industry due to the reliance on commodity ingredient products which would be easiest to replicate, Mrs Benny said.

Advanced economies that New Zealand tended to compare itself with were moving rapidly, investing in research via...