Making dairy-free cheese that tastes like the real thing

Sep 06

BY JOE ROWAN, September 6 2024

THE HEAT, VOYAGERS.io’s first-ever climate-tech festival, took place on Friday September 20 2024 at the extraordinary Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

THE HEAT is a hands-on, practical, mind-expanding, friendship-building, exploratory, curiosity-led, science-based, creative, artistic, participatory, decentralised, experimental, edgy, live, risky, urgent and unpredictable gathering of the talented people working on climate technologies. THE HEAT is not a conference. Don’t expect dull panels or awful coffee. Instead, come to make new friends, experience science in action, learn and share your knowledge, inspire and be inspired. Bring your most engaged and curious festival mindset.

London-based startups JULIENNE BRUNO and Better Dairy are both on a mission to make authentic-tasting dairy alternatives without using any animal ingredients. They brought alternatives to conventional cheeses for participants to sample at 🔥THE HEAT 2024.

🧠 Learn more about JULIENNE BRUNO and Better Dairy in our article below and at JULIENNEBRUNO.com and BetterDairy.com.

Participants got to taste future foods at THE HEAT 2024, the VOYAGERS community’s first climate-tech festival on September 20. Two of the innovative companies showcasing their range were JULIENNE BRUNO and Better Dairy — both on a mission to produce delicious dairy alternatives to conventional cheeses, without using any animal ingredients.

The key to both companies’ production processes? Fermentation. “We looked at the process that dairy takes, and we chose to follow that very closely, starting with soy,” explains Axel Katalan, London-based founder and CEO of JULIENNE BRUNO. “We use live cultures and fermentation to create the familiar tones that the wider population loves and associates with dairy, but without the use of dairy.” By contrast, Better Dairy, also London-based, focuses on the protein that gives milk its white colour. “What we’re doing with precision fermentation is we’re producing molecularly identical milk proteins,” says founder and CEO Jevan Nagarajah. “The first one that we’ve targeted is the casein protein, which lets you make a number of dairy products that are indistinguishable from the traditional ones, with just that protein.”

JULIENNE BRUNO founder and CEO Axel Katalan pouring oil over the company’s Burrella product

JULIENNE BRUNO sampled its 01 product range, which includes Burrella, Crematta and Superstraccia. As Katalan explains: “Burrella is the first product of its kind on the market that takes inspiration from the world of burrata. Superstraccia was also the first of its kind, and then there’s Crematta, inspired by cream cheese or mascarpone-style cheese that today is heavily used in restaurants for desserts, sauces, soup and other foods.”

Although Better Dairy’s products are not yet on the market, it’s working on an aged cheddar as its flagship product. Other cheeses in development include a blue cheese, and a Swiss-style Alpine cheese. At THE HEAT, participants got to taste cheese samples made with traditional bovine casein sourced by Better Dairy, which were animal-based since they were waiting for regulatory approval on their animal-free product. It also collaborated with fellow showcase company Hoxton Farms, offering a charity raffle whose winner was served a sit-down meal made with both companies’ products.

Better Dairy’s cheese prototype among other foods

For both companies, developing dairy-free cheese products has not been a straightforward journey. At JULIENNE BRUNO, their fresh approach meant that they had to build everything from scratch, factory included. “We chose to build the first factory ourselves because the type of textures and processes that we’ve created using soybeans did not exist in the market, and there was no-one that could produce these for us,” Katalan says. Better Dairy also faced a steep learning curve in working with casein at scale. “Casein is a very challenging protein, so a lot of our time has been spent just getting our microorganisms to produce it,” Nagarajah says. “We’re nearing that point where we can say that we’re happy with that process, and we can now look to scale it up.”

It can help having culinary superstars working with the startup teams. JULIENNE BRUNO’s head of food development is Spanish chef Albert Adrià, who was head of creativity at the triple-Michelin starred restaurant El Bulli in Spain. Katalan has also previously worked with the British restaurateur Alan Yau on projects from conception to marketing launch.

JULIENNE BRUNO has now delivered more than 2.8m product servings. The company has raised £6m in funding, including a £1m pre-Seed round led by Seedcamp and a £5m Seed round led by Berlin-based Cherry Ventures. The company has commercial partnerships with Whole Foods Market, Ocado and Co-op in Switzerland and is now focusing on its second collection, which will include firmer cheeses, yoghurts and drinks.

Better Dairy, meanwhile, has raised around £20.5m, including an £80k pre-Seed round led by Entrepreneur First, £1.6m in a Seed round led by Happiness Capital, and an £18.8m Series A round, led by Happiness Capital, redalpine and Vorwerk Ventures. Four-fifths of Better Dairy’s 34-strong team is composed of scientists, and founder Nagarajah has about 10 years of experience in building and scaling tech companies, having co-founded ShareDining, an online marketplace that matches food businesses with under-used commercial kitchens.

It, too, has bold plans for the future. “We’re already making progress towards cheese using our casein protein, unlocking other categories, like yoghurt and ice cream. Beyond that, I think we are going to extend further beyond just casein, starting off with other exciting milk proteins.”

Learn more about JULIENNE BRUNO at JULIENNEBRUNO.com and Better Dairy at BetterDairy.com.