The start-up creating animal-free dairy from cow cells

A Boston based start-up has successfully cultivated mammary cells from a cow in a lab, meaning real dairy can be produced without an animal being involved. Can this eventually become even more popular than alt-milk products?

If, despite mounting peer pressure, you’re still consuming cow milk on a daily basis, there may soon be a more ecological and entirely cruelty free way of doing so.

As mammals we’ve (in the main) reconciled with the idea that natural milk has to come from a teat, weird as it is. But, what if we could replicate the same biological processes to get the beverage without a sentient creature being involved?

Boston based start-up Brown Foods has found a way of achieving exactly that, creating ‘udderless’ cow milk with the same nutritional value, taste, and texture as the semi-skimmed bottles in our supermarkets – all under laboratory conditions, and without a bovine in sight.

Prior to its recent breakthrough, Brown Foods had long studied how mammary cells behave, what they require to survive, and what exactly triggers lactation.

Its bioengineers theorised that the natural cell structure of mammary glands could potentially yield milk with the expected levels of fats, carbs, and proteins under controlled conditions without the need for an animal to deliver the goods. Somehow, they were correct.

At the Y Combinator – a renowned tech start-up accelerator in California – researchers cultivated the cow cells over a matter of months and experimented before announcing their recent triumph.