Real milk proteins, no cows: Engineered bacteria for vegan cheese and yogurt

I was talking to one of the engineers at Daisy Lab[1] at a local hardware meetup a few months back. They are working on precision fermentation for dairyas described in the article. It's a really interesting technology and they seemed to be having really promising results.

[1] https://www.daisylab.co.nz/

If this stuff takes off it’s going to be real annoying for those who eat vegan for allergy reasons. I appreciate the trend to call things plant based because it’s more accurate for those who aren’t ethical vegans. Psyched for the ethical vegans that’ll get good cheese in a few years though. Plant based cheese leaves a lot to be desired.

I feel like this has a much better chance to succeed than lab-grown meat for two reasons:

1. It's grown using bacteria, which are much faster to reproduce and cultivate than animal cells. 2. The intended products are a homogeneous mixture, which means you don't need to worry as much about texture

I wonder if, like the precision fermentation process, these engineered bacteria can be fed into existing dairy processing machines that make ice cream and other derivative products. The win there is huge, it means practically replacing a very difficult to produce / maintain biological component (cows) with relatively stable component (vats of bacteria), with little impact to the rest of the production pipeline.

I wonder how allergens will be handled.

I have a dairy allergy, and so vegan cheese to me means safe to eat. When there is vegan cheese but its got "engineered" animal protean which sets of my allergies just as well as the naturally occurring stuff, its going to get even more complex to figure out what I can and cant eat.