Mega factories target cow-free milk and cheese to plug shortage
A new generation of alternative proteins promises to win over skeptical consumers by making cow-free dairy taste like the real thing. The trouble is there’s a dearth of factories needed to make them.
he shortage is being plugged by startups building facilities that cater to precision fermentation, a technology cultivating microbes to produce milk proteins found in animal products. That will mark a step shift in replacing the aging pharmaceutical sites that serve as production plants for new foods with large-scale manufacturing.
“The facilities weren’t built for that,” said Mark Warner, co-founder of Liberation Labs, which announced this week that it’s building a factory in Richmond, Indiana. “The analogy we like to use is, there’s all this new software out there but we have a bunch of old computers it’s running on.”
As investors cut back on funding and shoppers shun plant-based burgers or sausages, precision fermentation is gaining more attention as a way to revive the fortunes of alternative proteins and curb the environmental…
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