Cell-cultured milk tastes more like real cows’ milk versus plant-based alternative milk.

Alternative milk creator Brown Foods, which recently graduated from startup accelerator Y Combinator, has raised a $2.36 million seed round backed by AgFunder, SRI Capital, Amino Capital, Collaborative Fund, a group of individual angel investors, and Y Combinator itself. (AFN – AgFunderNews)

Brown Foods

The startup is developing an alternative milk dubbed UnReal Milk, created using mammalian cell culture technology. The company, founded a year ago by IIT alumni Sohail Gupta, Avhijeet Kapoor and Bhavna Tandon, was inspired by Gupta’s failure to find a milk alternative when his wife was pregnant.

His criteria for the milk: Friendly to both animals and the climate, vegetarian, and as nutritious as traditional dairy milk.

The startup, according to TechCrunch, managed to create “real cows’ milk” in a laboratory in a matter of just three months.

What’s more, their milk tasted and had a texture more like the real thing, because it used a cell-culture process, rather than a plant-based one.

Additionally, the nutritional benefits from Brown’s milk are comparable to cows’ milk, and it can be converted into dairy products such as butter, cheese and ice cream.

Furthermore, according to Brown, its milk-making process reduces carbon footprint by 90%.

This is a huge pay-off, given that the dairy sector accounts for 4% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Use of funds

Brown Foods will use the money from the seed fund round to further develop its product and to scale up its cell-cultivation process.

It expects that it will be a few years before the product will be commercially marketed.

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