Expanding Our Portfolio: Announcing Flora-Made Fats
Hey friends,
There’s a lot going on at Perfect Day! Now that we’ve demonstrated that our platform can scale robustly and that our protein can do everything we hoped – we’re hitting the market in a big way.
More on all that soon. Today, we want to share a really quick update on our platform: we’ve been building a team to expand our capabilities into animal-free, flora-made fats – starting with our favorite, of course – milk fat. In parallel to our efforts to make kinder, greener protein using fermentation, we’ll be creating a better source of animal fats, too.
The thinking here is:
1) We anticipate that in the future, as our protein and other alternative proteins elevate the texture, nutrition, and functionality of animal-free food products, the next major bottleneck for product quality will be capturing the complexity of animal fats. Once we can make real milk proteins and real milk fats without animals, our journey to create a kinder, greener kind of milk will be nearly complete.
Not to bore you with food chemistry, but briefly: similar to the world of proteins, animal fats are different than plant fats. They are imbued with beautifully complex flavor profiles, and perhaps more importantly, they have structure: you’ve probably noticed that things like lard or butter are solid at room temperature and melt, smoothly, as you heat them up. Very few plant fats can solidify, and they have their own issues…
2) As you may know, most products in the plant-based category today are formulated using either coconut or palm oil – both products with much simpler flavor and melt profiles than found in animal fats – and more importantly, both produced through intensive supply chains reliant on a small number of tropical countries.
Is this our future? Sustainable proteins adopted worldwide and combined with… fats and oils grown in former rainforests and shipped halfway across the world? Surely there’s a better way.
We’re a 21st century company: we want to anticipate future threats to global supply chains early enough to take action – not wait around until it’s too late. We think we can create better flavors while addressing a potential future scenario where products powered by alternative proteins start to put pressure on the planet through coconut and palm crops.
3) Since the beginning we’ve been building our flora platform to be as broad and powerful as possible. Now we’re beginning to see the benefits of this flexibility: The same approach of harnessing flora to efficiently and flexibly convert plant carbohydrates into protein can also be applied to make better fats and flavors.
In short, our love for dairy (and, well, tasty food in general) is so strong that we are driven to make the full dairy experience animal-free – a mission that requires the complex delicious flavor of milk fats too.
Last thing we want to point out: we’re excited to share this update with you, but we probably won’t post a ton of updates on this initiative until we have some prototypes to share with the world. Our number one focus in 2020 is commercializing the protein and kick-starting our new category through a bunch of partnerships spanning different product categories, available through several channels, and even across multiple countries.
Look out for more updates soon!
Cheers,
Ryan & Perumal
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