Dive Brief:
- A biotech startup named Muufri - pronounced "moo free" - is creating a bioengineered milk it expects to begin selling next year.
- Muufri's approach is quite different from the traditional plant-based alternatives to cow milk. Muufri is building its milk from the ground up by adding cow DNA sequences to yeast cultures and then harvesting the resulting milk proteins.
- The idea is to create a milk that tastes exactly like cow milk without using animals.
Dive Insight:
Muufri isn't the first company to seek to create a plant-based version of a mainstream food as a way to prevent animal cruelty, save the planet, and feed a growing global population. The best-known player in this space is Hampton Creek, the techie-backed company that just won a distribution deal with Whole Foods.
What's new here is Muufri and a handful of other innovators are moving into a new area of science known as synthetically modified organisms, and just like those that fear GMOs, not everyone is convinced synthetic biology is a wise move.