If you try to avoid dairy products, you’ve probably tried ice cream made from soy milk, or coconut milk, or oat milk. They can be good, but the reality is that it’s hard to make plant-based ice cream or cheese or yogurt that truly tastes like real dairy. That’s why the startup Perfect Day uses real milk proteins in its products—but it grows the proteins with fermentation, not cows.
“We grew up eating everything: dairy, eggs, meat,” says Perfect Day cofounder Perumal Gandhi, who started the company with Ryan Pandya shortly after graduating from MIT in 2014. “Like many of our friends, we gave up meat to go vegetarian when we started college, and then finally made the leap to a fully plant-based vegan diet. We realized that being vegan is actually pretty difficult, because all the alternative products that were available either didn’t taste that great, or didn’t have a lot of nutrition in them, or just cost a lot more money.”
When they launched Perfect Day—the winner in the food category of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—in 2014, the founders (both 23) hoped to have a glass of milk ready to go within months. But it took six and a half years to bring the first product with its animal-free dairy proteins to market: Brave Robot, a brand of ice cream that tastes indistinguishable from traditional ice cream. A spinoff called the Urgent Company created the new brand and is now working on bringing other products to market, including cheese. The company is also beginning to supply ingredients to larger food manufacturers.
A shift away from dairy would make a difference. While the conversation about food and climate change usually focuses on meat, dairy also has a significant footprint. By one calculation, it’s responsible for more than 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—far more than the entire aviation industry. “Animal agriculture worked when they were 3 billion people,” Gandhi says. “It’s not going to work when we add 9 billion over the next few decades.”