New Culture Animal Free Dairy Cheese – Lab Grown – Funding and Process
Lab grown mozzarella, or animal free dairy cheese, just hit American pizza without a single cow or FDA approval. The company behind the New Culture is funded by Kraft, the maker of singles and Velveeta cheese.
New Culture takes a single cow gene, splice it into a lab microbe, and ferment it in steel tanks until casing comes out. That casing is then whipped of tap water and sunflower oil before being spun into stretchy white balls.
FDA Never Approved Animal Free Dairy Cheese by New Culture
Here’s the crazy part, the FDA never approved New Culture animal free dairy cheese under a legal loophole called self-grass, where the company basically declared its own cheese is safe and started selling it. Be very cautious because it’s already being used in American restaurants and they won’t call it lab-grown.
New Culture Company Details
New Culture is a San Leandro, California-based food technology startup founded in 2019 that produces animal free dairy cheese (Lab Grown) using precision fermentation. The company does not use animals or traditional plant-based ingredients; instead, it uses genetically engineered microbes to produce casein proteins (alpha, beta, and kappa caseins) that are bioidentical to those found in cow’s milk.
These animal-free caseins are then combined with water, plant-based fats, sugars, and minerals to create cheese that mimics the taste, texture, melt, and stretch of conventional dairy. New Culture’s primary product is animal-free mozzarella cheese (Lab Grown), which debuted at Pizzeria Mozza American restaurant in Los Angeles in 2024. The company has achieved significant milestones, including securing GRAS status for its casein and scaling production to create enough cheese for 25,000 pizzas per fermentation run.
