Perfect Day is using mushrooms to make dairy products

Cow's milk substitutes, such as oatmeal and soy milk, will no longer surprise anyone on the market today. However, the California startup Perfect Day takes this food industry even further, using mushrooms to make dairy products. "Perfect Day uses mushrooms to make milk proteins that are" molecularly identical "to the proteins in cow's milk," said Ryan Pandya, co-founder of the company. This means that it can also be used to make dairy products, such as cheese or yoghurt. "We were interested in the question of what's in the milk - what gives it the incredible versatility and nutrition that plant milks lack," Pandya told CNN. The company uses the so-called fermentation process. Perfect Day assembled a gene that encodes whey protein in cow's milk and introduced it into the fungus. When the fungus is grown in fermentation tanks, it produces whey protein, which is then filtered and dried to a powder used in products including cheese and ice cream. "The method of precise fermentation is nothing new in the food industry; on the contrary, thanks to mushrooms such as yeast and the fermentation process, we have been obtaining important ingredients for decades, such as rennet for cheese production or vanillin. However, the use of this well-known method in the production of animal proteins and the development of milk, cheese, ice cream or egg whites without the use of animals is innovative, ”explains Eva Hemmerová, ProVeg Česko's communication manager.