WE'VE all heard about Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat making plant-based burgers that taste almost like the real thing. In fact, some people say their burger patties are indistinguishable from real beef patties.
But what about milk? Of course, already in the market are plant-based alternatives like soya milk, almond milk and cashew milk. Those are fine as alternatives to milk for your cereals but they don't taste anything like real milk. That situation might change quite soon.
This past month alone we've seen two big developments in the milk-substitute industry; one involving NotCo, a plant-based, milk alternative manufacturer from South America, and the other from Impossible Foods, the maker of the Impossible Burger.
NOTCO
NotCo makes the aptly-named, plant-based NotMilk. It has just launched this brand in a big way in the United States through Whole Foods Market, a popular grocery store chain that focuses on healthy and organic food. NotCo is backed by venture capital companies, including Bezos Expeditions, owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the parent company of Whole Foods.
NotMilk will be available at 468 Whole Foods stores nationwide starting this month in two varieties: NotMilk Whole and NotMilk 2 per cent Reduced Fat.
"At Whole Foods Market, we always look for high-quality products for our customers, and our customers want a product like NotMilk that offers the flavour of cow's milk, but plant-based," said Parker Brody, senior global category manager at Whole Foods. "We're excited and honoured to be the first to introduce NotMilk to our customers, and we look forward to continuing to evolve this alliance."
NotCo's milk alternative is based on pea-derived protein combined with a blend of pineapple and cabbage juice concentrate. Why cabbage and pineapples, you might wonder? While most plant-based alternatives for milk rely on one core ingredient (e.g. soya beans, almonds or cashews), NotMilk uses a blend of ingredients identified by the company's proprietary artificial intelligence programme, dubbed Giuseppe.
Giuseppe's algorithm is designed to help mimic the nutritional values, taste and feel of real milk using only plant-based raw materials. "When you think about the taste of milk, a human mind would never think that a combination of pineapple and cabbage could recreate the taste of milk, but Giuseppe — our artificial intelligence — can and does," said NotCo chief executive officer (CEO) Matias Muchnick.
Adding, he said: "That's the power of introducing a new technology into an obsolete system. You're adding a whole new world of innovative possibilities that are good for us and the environment."
According to Muchnick, it took the company two years to get the right formulation. Part of the reason it took so long, he shared, was that they wanted NotMilk to have similar nutritional values as cow's milk. The result is something that has the same taste, smell and texture of real cow's milk.
This is important because statistics show that a significant number of people are likely to switch back to the real thing if the substitute isn't realistic enough.
"We know that 33 per cent of plant-based milk consumers in the US move back to dairy because of compromises in taste," says Lucho Lopez-May, CEO of NotCo in the USA. "We are here to change that. There are many options in the market, but they miss something — whether that be look, taste or texture — but NotMilk has it all."
IMPOSSIBLE FOODS
Hot on the heels of NotCo is Impossible Foods, which recently announced that it has developed a prototype for a plant-based substitute for milk, dubbed Impossible Milk, which not only tastes like milk but has culinary properties similar to real cow's milk as well.
For example, it doesn't curdle when poured into hot liquids such as coffee, tea or cocoa. It can be frothed for making cappuccinos and it has a creamy texture similar to the real thing. During a recent virtual press conference demonstration of Impossible Milk, Laura Kliman, the company's senior flavour scientist, demonstrated a prototype.
Kliman poured some milk into a hot cup of coffee and showed how the two could mix well (plant-based milk alternatives often curdle when mixed with milk.) She also displayed how Impossible Milk could foam up like dairy milk.
"Our functional milk prototypes are really creamy versus gritty and what the team really strives to do is not just create another soya milk or nutmilk, but products that taste and function just like the animal derived version," Kliman said, adding: "Clearly the appearance of our milk is much closer to cow's milk. You can pour it into hot beverages without having it precipitate. It combines really nicely with coffee, you can froth it, and the proteins we're using are very stable so you can make nice foams."
Meanwhile, Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown made it clear to journalists that they're playing for keeps. "Our intention isn't just to make another plant-based milk to add to the shelf full of plant-based milks; it's to make something that for a dairy milk lover is better than anything that comes from a cow. That's an unsolved problem and it's critical to our mission. So stay tuned, it's going to be awesome."
As of now, Impossible Milk isn't ready for commercial release yet. Impossible Foods has not provided a timeline for the launch of its alternative milk product.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com.
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