In Denmark, foodtech startup Remilk has announced plans to build the world’s largest cow-free milk plant. The 750,000-square-foot facility will be built in Kalundborg and produce as much protein annually for cheese, yogurt, and ice cream that can be generaterd by 50,000 cows.
“We’re making dairy products that are identical to cow-milk products, with the same taste, texture, stretchiness, meltiness, with no cholesterol and no lactose,” Remilk founder and CEO Aviv Wolff recently told The Times of Israel. “We’ve basically ported the whole mechanism of producing milk into a single-cell microbe. We don’t need the ‘rest of the cow,’ and we surely don’t need to spend resources in the process of creating a 900-kilogram animal.”
Relying on animals to make our food is no longer sustainable, he adds. “The implications of animal farming are devastating for our planet.”
Wolff and cofounder Ori Cohavi developed the technology by first determining the chemical composition of milk. They mapped out the proteins needed to create milk in addition to fat, lactose, and sugar to recreate milk without cows. They genetically engineered yeast to produce the proteins efficiently and in a scalable way.
Remilk raised $120 million in in January 2022 to build the plant and accelerate scale-up.