Perfect Day, Inc. is a food technology startup company based in Berkeley, California, that has developed processes of creating dairy proteins, including casein and whey, by fermentation in microbiota, specifically from Trichoderma fungi in bioreactors, instead of extraction from bovine milk.
Since its launch in 2014, the company has secured a total of $361.5M, according to Crunchbase. The new production facility and office space will allow the company to continue nurturing business growth; continue to solidify new partners; increase production capacity and extend its product portfolio.
On July 11, 2019, Perfect Day released its first product, an ice cream made from non-animal whey protein. The launch was limited to 1,000 3-pint bundles available for $60 and sold exclusively through the company’s website. The production run sold out within hours.
As of 2020, Perfect Day is commercializing its products through the Urgent Company, which sells the Brave Robot brand of vegan dairy ice cream. In November 2020, ice cream maker Graeter’s began to sell vegan dairy ice cream based on Perfect Day products. Perfect Day also began supplying the company Smitten Ice Cream for its N’ice Cream products.
To produce whey and casein proteins from non-animal sources, Perfect Day bioengineered microbiota to include DNA sequences that instruct the cells to produce proteins that are conventionally found in cow’s milk. The microbiota are then grown in fermentation tanks where they convert a carbohydrate source such as corn sugar into flora-based dairy protein.
Similar recombinant technology is used elsewhere in the food industry, including to make rennet (a common cheesemaking enzyme) and heme. The resulting protein, once separated from the genetically modified microbiota, has the same organoleptic and nutritional properties as its animal-derived analog. After they are separated and dried into a powder, the proteins are used as ingredients in other foods that conventionally contain dairy protein.
According to en.wikipedia; vegconomist.com. Source of photo: internet
