It's Not Milk...?
Founded in 2017 with a mission to reverse engineer popular animal-based foods (milk, mayo, ice cream, burgers) and rebuild them with plant-based ingredients, Santiago-based NotCo recently made its US debut in 450 Whole Foods stores with NotMilk, a pea-based milk containing 4g protein and 3g fiber.
NotCo – which recently closed an $85m Series C funding round - utilizes AI and machine learning to inform recipe generation and processing decisions, says co-founder and CEO Matias Muchnick.
Its pea-protein-based NotBurger, for example, contains spinach and cacao; while NotMilk features pineapple and cabbage, two ingredients you wouldn’t expect to see in a plant-based milk, which NotCo’s tech platform identified as a combination that would generate lactones, aroma compounds found in dairy products, which "make our brains understand that this is milk," he says.
While trial and error in the kitchen could have determined that this combination of fruits and veggies might work well, a computer algorithm determined this in seconds, he points out.
