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Alternative milks have become a key success point for the plant-based milk movement, signaling that they can change consumer purchasing behavior.
According to National Consumer PanelIn 2022, 41% of U.S. households purchased plant-based milk, with oat milk and almond milk being the most popular.
Turtle Tree Labs hopes that openness will translate into cultured milk produced through biofermentation, which is not vegetable milk but real milk cells produced by yeast.
The dairy industry contributes About ~ 4% Greenhouse gas emissions, 2 billion tons of CO2 per year. Dairy production uses millions of tons of water each year. One cow consumes 30-50 gallons of water During lactation, a day. Feeding and raising cows, sheep, goats and buffaloes takes about 2.5 billion acres of landIt covers about 7% of the Earth’s total land area.
The promise of cultured milk is that it can provide real animal milk with a much lower carbon and landscape footprint, while eliminating the animal suffering that commonly comes with these products.
Turtle Tree CEO Fengru Lin got her start in the dairy industry making artisanal cheese. When she met company founder Max Rye, Lin brought her Google background to the party, and the tech giant got involved. The company has a testing lab in California, but works with contract manufacturers to make its products.
Turtle Tree’s initial focus was on cultured milk products, but the company has since pivoted to a dairy supplement called lactoferrin, which is marketed as an adult nutrition ingredient by performance coffee companies. Cadence Performance Coffee and Plant-based milk company Strive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Food Dive: Can you explain how cultured milk is produced?
Lin Fengru: We can take a sample of mammary cells, such as breast cells, and extract them from freshly expressed breast milk. After extracting these cells, we multiply them to induce lactation. The amount that comes out is still very small. It is so small that we have not been able to do a commercial analysis of the production. We are not sure if it will be suitable as a food product even after 7-10 years. It seems like it would be better as a pharmaceutical product to support babies at risk or NICU babies.
FD: What prompted you to focus on lactoferrin in your fully cultured milk products?
Lin: Milk is a very complex liquid. It contains over 2,000 different components, so even regulators have time to characterize all the components in milk. We started the company with the idea of cultivated milk, but Fonterras I told them everything in the world and said, ‘Hey, we can produce milk. What do you think?’
The feedback we got was that milk is a commodity. It’s a product that costs $2 to $4 a gallon. You can’t get to that price point (with farmed milk). You have to focus on the high value ingredients. So today, we’re laser-focused on the high value ingredients that are found in milk. For us, a high value single ingredient makes sense.
FD: Is that lactoferrin? Why is that such an important ingredient?
Lin: Most lactoferrin is in infant and toddler supplements because it has so many benefits for gut health, immune support and regulation. It helps you think better because it can carry iron. It helps your muscles recover better. The first lactoferrin we’re targeting is actually the cow, dairy version. We’re starting with the adult nutrition market. There’s a lot of untapped opportunity in the adult nutrition market. I take lactoferrin to help with immune regulation. There’s a lot of potential (in the case of lactoferrin) to be the next omega-3 in the food industry.
FD: How do you produce lactoferrin?
Lin: Precision fermentation. This technology is used to produce ingredients for cheese making or insulin for diabetics, and we are using the same method to produce cow’s milk ingredients. We can manipulate various microorganisms, such as yeast, to code specific DNA structures into the microorganisms. Then the microorganisms eat common sugars and pump out the target proteins like animals do, but without having to go through the animals. Then we isolate lactoferrin from the fermentation liquid.
Through this process, we can produce just one protein. It’s a very clean product. And because everyone in the food industry likes clean ingredients, we can formulate and standardize around that.
FD: What is your business model? And what is the pricing?
Lin: We want to enable a wide range of beverage companies and food companies to add lactoferrin to their beverage products, and the end consumer to make a conscious choice to choose a product made with Turtle Tree products. It’s business to business to consumer.
(Traditional) lactoferrin comes from cow’s milk. We are aiming to meet the market price, which is around $800 to $1,000 per kilogram today. The world’s largest producer is in Europe, and the world’s largest consumer is in China. These lactoferrin companies have to increase the value of the remaining milk. Once you take the lactoferrin out of the milk, you can’t make milk chocolate or put it in a box. So you have to think very carefully about how to increase the value of the remaining milk.
FD: Is the goal to make lactoferrin from human milk instead of cow’s milk?
Lin: Yes, of course. That’s part of our plan. We can support other proteins, like human lactoferrin, as part of our pipeline. We know that human lactoferrin requires a lot more regulatory focus. Because it’s a human protein, if the structure isn’t perfect, it can have a negative impact on the immune system. So the FDA is very strict about that. There are a lot of clinical trials that need to be done before that.
FD: Many meat and dairy alternatives saw an uptick in 2020 and 2021, but investment and consumer purchases have declined in recent years. Are you concerned?
Lin: There are a lot of plant-based products, even cell-based products. They are commodity-priced products. It will be difficult to achieve price parity with technology. There will always be a price war, and it will be difficult to charge consumers much more for a sustainability story.
We were very careful in choosing lactoferrin so that we could get to profitability much earlier and much faster than other companies. So yes, I am watching it very closely. We have a slightly different angle. It is too early to say for sure if this is the winning solution, but we are very confident.
