How Nourish Ingredients Made Its Milk Substitute Creamy

My background is R&D. I worked for the CSIRO, which is Australia's national research agency. One of the things that we did was to build a fish oil-canola crop. From a technical perspective, we managed to get the levels that we needed, the levels of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) – key omega-3 fatty acids. More importantly, we got the crop regulated in several countries around the world, and it has since become quite a successful commercial crop. It was really great to see that you can take an animal fat and create an animal free-platform for it. At the end of that journey, we looked around and thought, “What else can we do that with?”

At the beginning of the journey we looked at some of the other cellular companies growing animal products via yeast precision fermentation. The conclusion we reached is that, yes, it is possible to do, but the problem is the economics don't stack up; precision fermentation is expensive. The amount of carbon you have to feed into a system to produce a bit of tallow fat, well, it just doesn't stack up in terms of the economics; you've got to put too much sugar in the front end, which then gets converted into fat.

Instead, we started looking at the other end of the spectrum, the much more potent fats that give animal products their characteristic taste experience. In the case of dairy, this is something called the milk fat globule, which is a really special structure inside of milk and goes a long way to giving it the creaminess and taste of milk.

Correct. Those are the two that really stood out to us in terms of the gaps in the market. Five years ago, when we began Nourish Ingredients, there was a huge amount of focus on plant-based foods. Our assumption back then – and it has stood the test of time – is that such foods were not yet good enough to really convince consumers to become repeat purchases. 

Our thinking was, “What do you need to do in order to make them better?” And, to us, it all came down to authenticity. If you follow that thought process through, you arrive at these two ingredient categories, one of which is meat and one of which is dairy fat. Creamilux is the dairy one – this is a short-chain phospholipid and it acts both from a mechanical physio-chemical function and a taste modulator. It gives it something that's noticeably dairy. Tastilux is the meat analogue. This is a long-chain omega-6 phospholipid which we derived from a fungal strain. Both of these are non-GMO but very carefully selected and cultivated, because doing anything else via fermentation is really expensive to produce.

Our product doesn't have any lactose in it at all. Usually with a dairy-free milk or cheese you add in flavors which taste dairy-like, and these are usually chemically derived, synthesized flavors. The approach we’ve taken is a little different.

What we did was look back to normal milk and try and figure out what is it that was present in milk that makes it creamy and tastes the way it does. And it really comes down to this structure called a milk fat globule, which contains a triglyceride wrapped with phospholipids. This is present in natural milk, but not in any of the plant-based type milks. The structure of Creamilux is the same as the normal milk fat globule. 

Being able to do this sort of thing with ingredients is really relatively new, to create a version which is sort of halfway between the natural version and can be low cost and yet have a larger size impact in terms of flavor and taste. It’s really the best of both worlds.

We are at the very low-inclusion, high-potency end of the ingredient spectrum, so that means what we are adding into the final food is 1% or less of the total food in the product. So any health effect that we're having is going to be relatively minor. But we can help displace less-than-healthy ingredients.

Take coffee creams, for example. These often have really high levels of saturated fats. So this is something that we can add Creamilux into to give it a certain type of mouthfeel, a certain consistency, and do away with most of those saturated fats.

Yeah, there are differences between the regions in terms of the precise formulation that ticks the local taste box. The goal for us is – when you think about the supply chain and the logistics around it – how far back in the process can you go to have a common element that ticks all of those boxes?

It’s a lot of effort. I think initially, naively, I had a view that we'd build just a chassis product and then that would be it. But the supply chains are a bit more complex and you have to at least do some level of tailoring to make it fit.