Imagine some kind of vegan Frankenstein in the lab making milk or meat out of yeast cells. Well, it’s happening around the world, as more and more people worry about meat’s environmental impact and cruelty to animals. But some vegans are uneasy about the kind of work that Real Deal Milk and other cellular agriculture pioneers are doing.

My local Facebook vegan group has periodically been abuzz about it. One member complained after buying an ice cream made from non-animal whey. “I got scammed by this too… Even if it’s a synthetic dairy product, it’s not vegan to me.” Another retorted, “It’s 100% vegan. How many animals were exploited? Zero. You don’t get to redefine veganism at your whim.” Etcetera.

The thought of eating real cheese after all this time makes me a bit queasy. But really, if animals aren’t harmed, why not?

Real Deal Milk is one of the companies working on developing a perfect lab-made, animal-free cheese. I got the opportunity to do an email interview with Zoltan Toth-Czifra, a software engineer who became the founder/CEO of Real Deal Milk, for an Inhabitat article. Since our interview had to be edited for space, Toth-Czifra graciously said I could post it in entirety on this site. Here’s what I learned about his dreams for his cellular agriculture company.

How did you go from software engineering to revolutionizing the milk biz?

In 2021 it’s widely recognized that animal farming has a detrimental effect on our environment. From contributing to greenhouse gases to using enormous amounts of land and water, the consumption of animal products has dire consequences. Not to mention the extreme abuse of animals suffering in the realm of industrial farming. That’s true to dairy farming too, even though most people still picture a girl milking a single cow into a wooden bucket in the Swiss alps when they think of milk.

Conscious eating is on the rise, but it’s not rising fast enough to offset the increasing demand for animal protein globally. And there are strong arguments for keeping our dietary habits – perhaps the preservation of our food culture is the one that resonates the most here in Europe. Can you imagine the world without mozzarella?

It’s clear to me that this conflict needs to be resolved. This is where technology will help us, like it helped us fight scarcity, eradicate diseases, or heat our homes. This time it’s here to restore our innocence.

Like everyone else, I often feel guilt associated with my choices as a consumer. When I book a flight ticket, when I buy a new t-shirt or when I eat a piece of cheese, I know that my choices are causing trouble somewhere else. I know that I can never reduce that guilt to zero, no matter how much joy I remove from my life. But I can choose to actively work on something that will remove that guilt. After all, t-shirts, flight tickets and cheese are amazing things. We should enjoy them – and we should work on building a world where we don’t have to feel guilty about them.

This realization has led me to start Real Deal Milk in 2021. 

Is your primary market vegans who miss the taste of milk or dairy consumers who want a lighter environmental footprint?

While I think vegans will be our first evangelists, in our philosophy we follow Patrick Brown, the CEO of Impossible Foods: he says that he wants to make products for carnivores and not vegetarians or vegans who already made the sacrifice of adjusting their diets. It’s because we can only make a big enough impact on the environment if we take everyone with us. So we want to make dairy products for people who already eat dairy products. And to do that, we need to be as good as traditional dairy, or better. This means matching experience and price.

In that our mission is akin to Tesla’s: they didn’t have the illusion that people would be switching to electric cars that are inferior to internal combustion engine cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They realized that they needed to build a better car, something that petrolheads would love and be happy to switch to. We need to make dairy that dairy eaters love and are happy to switch to.

When will Real Deal Milk hit the market, or has it already? And if so, where?

We are still in the research phase at Real Deal Milk, so is everyone else around the world working on the same problem. There’s no real, purely precision fermentation-based dairy product on the market right now. But that will change soon. If you don’t believe me, just follow the money. VCs don’t usually fund projects where they don’t see the return in 5-7 years, and there is a lot of VC money going into precision fermentation dairy right now. 

Based in Spain we will first be heading to the European market. Currently we are in an incubator program run by Pascual Innoventures (yes, the milk producer Pascual!) and Eatable Adventures. By the end of the program in March 2022 I think we will be in a good shape to open up a funding round. 

Our mission can only succeed if we (and others) think really big. If, at the end of the day, we sell a few thousand tons of cheese or milk we’ve done nothing. Impact is especially relevant in places like China where the population is developing hunger for protein, including dairy. However, due to the shortage of arable land, China is already facing a food crisis. As the largest food importer in the world, it’s hard pressed to reduce its dependence on foreign supply and improve production efficiency in any way possible. I believe that cellular agriculture will play an important role in the future of China.

How is Real Deal Milk better than all the plant-based milks available?

It’s important to distinguish between plant-based alternatives and cellular agriculture. The former intends to mimic animal-based food experiences with plants. Think almond milk as a substitute for milk or texturized soy to replace meat. There’s a lot of innovation going on in this field and I quite like many of these products, but ultimately it will always just be plants masquerading as meat or milk.

Cellular agriculture, on the other hand, has a different goal. It creates food equivalent to the traditional versions down to the molecular level. There’s a lot of research going into making real meat without killing animals by building animal muscle cells one by one. Similar innovation is happening with eggs, seafood, and, of course, dairy, where we are.

The advantage of course is that people don’t need to compromise. They can enjoy meat, dairy, and eggs as they always did, without skipping a beat. Fidelity to the original is extremely important in a sector so culturally rich as cheese. I want my future children to enjoy real stretchy mozzarella cheese on a slice of pizza or real Parmesan cheese on their macaroni. That’s what we are working on.

What do you say to vegans who freak out, thinking this is some kind of GMO Frankenfood?

Yeast have played a crucial role in the history of humanity. They gave us bread and beer, and it is going to give us milk very soon. At Real Deal Milk we are teaching yeast cells how to produce milk proteins much more efficiently than cows ever could. The technology is called precision fermentation and it has proven itself in the pharmaceutical industry in the last decades. So it’s not a new and scary technology, it’s one we’ve been using for years and is already present within consumers lives, they just might not know it.