Animal-free dairy start-up New Culture has announced the achievement of a new milestone in the scale-up of its fermentation manufacturing process.

The California-based company uses precision fermentation to create what it claims is the world’s first-ever animal-free casein, a dairy protein previously only found in animal milk.

According to New Culture, its casein enables it to produce a mozzarella product that has the same taste, texture and nutritional profile as its conventional cow-based counterpart without using any animal ingredients.

New Culture has now scaled up its fermentation process to manufacturing volumes far larger than previous deployment volumes, enabling the production of 25,000 pizzas worth of cheese per run, a significant step forward in its plans to supply animal-free mozzarella to pizzerias across America.

The new large scale of production reduces product costs by 80 per cent, the start-up revealed, keeping it on track to reach cost targets after having exceeded its core technical goals for 2023.

Within three years, New Culture expects its animal-free mozzarella to achieve cost parity with conventional mozzarella, with annual casein volumes that equate to more than 14 million pizzas worth of cheese.

Co-founder and CSO, Inja Radman, said: “Our world-class team at New Culture has solved a string of incredibly complex technical challenges in order to produce our animal-free casein at this scale. We are redefining the boundaries of what’s possible in dairy in a way that isn’t being done anywhere else.”

New Culture’s mozzarella will be first available in 2024 at chef Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza restaurant in Los Angeles, before expanding to other pizzerias across the US.

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