"The three of us found out about this startup accelerator; it was accepting applications for three more days," Pandya said of IndieBio. "We stayed up all night working on these applications. We got in, and so we were in Ireland for three months in 2014."In Ireland, Muufri was born. It was a man-made, vegan dairy milk.A photo posted by New Harvest (@newharvestorg) on Apr 15, 2015 at 9:05am PDT
"Our products are made from real milk proteins combined with plant-based (lactose-free) sugar, healthy plant fats, vitamins, and minerals," the website read. "They have the same taste and texture as cow's milk, but pack in more nutrition with no food safety or contamination concerns."Ryan and Perumal of @Muufri, making #sustainable #animal-free #dairy #milk at their first lab at #SynbioAxlr8r in #Cork, #Ireland A photo posted by New Harvest (@newharvestorg) on Feb 24, 2015 at 7:02pm PST
"We were kind of going for this Häagen-Dazs kind of Central European vague thing—and it was vague. It was kind of punny because it is free of moo," Pandya said. "We started feeling like that name was really anchoring us to what we aren't—we are defining ourselves by our lack of moo."That felt like the wrong framing. We want to focus instead on the positive, what we're actually trying to build instead of what we're trying to move away from," he said."And it was annoying to spell over the phone."After compiling thousands of name ideas on an Excel spreadsheet, the team still hadn't found something that fit until coming across a study done at the University of Leicester in 2001 on dairy cows."If you play calming music to dairy cows, they produce more milk," Gandhi said of the study's conclusion. "Then they asked the question, 'Which song produces the most milk?' And one of the top contenders was 'Perfect Day' by Lou Reed."It just sort of clicked in our brains: That's a super-cool story, let's go and make a perfect day of our own."A photo posted by Ryan Pandya (@ryanpandya) on May 29, 2014 at 9:58am PDT
Gandhi and Pandya hit the ground running right out of the gate. The team could, because unlike developing meat without animals using tissue engineering, creating milk without cows could be done using technology that already existed."We wanted to see if we could apply that same type of thinking—taking medical technology and using it to make better, safer food," Pandya said."The way we're doing that is the same way that proteins are made for a million other things today. The way proteins are made for medicine and multivitamins and laundry detergent—even proteins to help clean up stains and stuff—it's all made the same way. Even rennet for vegetarian cheese is made this way."But what struck us was no one was using this incredibly mature technology to make milk proteins and make kinder, greener dairy products. So that's what we decided to do."The latest prototypes of Muufri's animal-free milk, made with milk proteins made in yeast!! You saw it here first!! A photo posted by New Harvest (@newharvestorg) on Dec 31, 2015 at 2:43pm PST
A photo posted by Perfect Day (@perfectdayfoods) on Aug 31, 2016 at 4:26pm PDT
With its new DNA "blueprint," the yeast ferments sugar and creates real milk proteins in a process similar to craft brewing that the company calls "yeast farming.""Then we add a special mix of plant-based sugars, fats, and minerals to make a totally new kind of dairy milk without chemicals, hormones, lactose, or other nonsense," the website explains.The final product is filtered and purified of all yeast, making it a non-GMO food, something the Perfect Day team is determined to clarify to potentially wary customers."We're using genetic engineering to make yeast, right? But the product is non-GMO," Gandhi said, "and that's the nuance we're really hoping to be able to communicate clearly to people, because the protein that we're making is not an organism, it's not a GMO, and it's the same exact thing found in cow's milk.@Perumal_Gandhi's first taste of Muufri 0.1 (just casein in water). Verdict: "needs improvement" @liaonet #muufri A photo posted by Ryan Pandya (@ryanpandya) on May 29, 2014 at 3:13am PDT
Since the company's inception in Ireland, it has raised $4 million and grown to 12 people including key staff member Ravi Jhala, Perfect Day's head of food development. Jhala was responsible for taking Perfect Day to the next level in terms of flavor and mouthfeel, a task that brought together art and science."He was one of the innovation managers at Chobani, and within his second week of joining us, the samples he made were just way better than anything we had in the past two years," Gandhi said. "He just knew what was missing from our product, what to reduce, what to add. It was a little bit of both craft and science. He's absolutely killed it.A photo posted by New Harvest (@newharvestorg) on Sep 22, 2015 at 12:25pm PDT