New Culture targets $50 billion cheese market with new patent

Animal-free dairy startup New Culture expands its intellectual property portfolio with the grant of a mozzarella-specific patent that strengthens its position in the emerging animal-free casein space as the company focuses on foodservice with plans to move toward commercial scale. The newly granted patent, US Patent No. 12,635,703 , protects New Culture’s animal-free mozzarella, which combines precision-fermented alpha-s1 casein (one of the major proteins in mammal milk) with plant-oils, salts, sugars and minerals. The patent builds on New Culture’s US Patent No. 11,771,105 , granted in 2023, which broadly covers animal-free cheese products’ functional attributes (melt, stretch, creaminess or hardness) made from recombinant alpha-casein regardless of cheese type, formulation or manufacturing process. The company also self-affirmed its animal-free casein is Generally Recognized As Safe in 2024. Given New Culture’s relationship with pizzerias, including Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, the new patent is aimed at the product attributes that matter most to foodservice customers, according to the company’s Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Inja Radman. One of the most difficult challenges in alternative cheese is recreating mozzarella’s functional characteristics, particularly because it exhibits different attributes in cooked and raw forms, Radman noted . New Culture’s mozzarella “meets specific, measurable performance thresholds for stretch and texture,” she said. New Culture’s commercialization strategy continues to center on foodservice, particularly pizzerias, where mozzarella represents the largest segment of the US cheese market. “For now, we’re laser-focused on mozzarella for pizzerias. Mozzarella is the largest segment in the US cheese market at $9 billion. And plant-based products aren’t making a dent due to their subpar taste and texture. So we see a massive opportunity in mozzarella to have an impact for the next few years,” Radman said. While the company’s products are not yet being produced at commercial scale, she argues that the long-term economics are promising. “Given we’re not yet manufacturing our casein or cheese at mass-market production scale, our costs are definitely higher than conventional mozzarella. However, when we plug in our current manufacturing KPIs at that large production scale, we not only reach the cost of conventional mozzarella but we actually undercut it. And we’re very much on track to get there thanks to our relationships with world-class CMOs [co-manufacturing partners] and ingredient manufacturers.” Thanks to New Culture’s co-manufacturing partners, Radman says the company’s commercial challenges are largely operational rather than technical. “We are currently deep in the weeds of going through the scale-up process with our CMO partners. There aren’t actually bottlenecks in the sense that we need some big technical breakthrough or process discovery. It’s just a matter of producing at each larger scale, learning about scale-dependent adaptations, and getting the process ready to repeat in campaign manufacturing runs over and over and over again,” she said. New Culture faces competition from a growing group of animal-free dairy startups pursuing recombinant casein proteins, including Better Dairy , Imagindairy and New Moo and Standing Ovation. Radman explains that New Culture’s competitive advantage stems not only from producing its core ingredient alpha-s1 casein, but from years of experience optimizing the ingredient for food applications. “Alpha-s1 has been central to our product strategy from the beginning. Over the past seven years, we have built substantial know-how around producing and formulating animal-free alpha-s1-casein for dairy product applications, focusing on cheese,” she said. Radman also points to New Culture’s formulation expertise as another competitive edge, particularly for other dairy applications. “We have an incredibly sophisticated understanding of our ingredient and have mastered how to utilize it to formulate high quality dairy products - not just for cheese but for other dairy categories as well,” she added. Although precision-fermented whey proteins have reached the market ahead of casein, New Culture sees casein as the ingredient with the greatest long-term commercial potential. “Producing casein via precision fermentation is very difficult technologically, much more difficult than whey. This is reflected in both the patent space and the commercial traction we see,” Radman explained. She argues that mastering casein opens categories that whey alone cannot. “The real prize is casein, which is the only protein on earth that can unlock the cheesy properties we all love and therefore can unlock the $50 billion US cheese market.” She added that the protein is essential for products that require complex textures and functionalities, like yogurt or creamer. Although yogurt, creamers, beverages and high-performance nutrition products are on the horizon, those opportunities will come later, once production capacity expands, according to Radman. Until then, foodservice remains the priority. Feedback from operators has strengthened the company’s focus on functionality. Chefs have responded positively to both the eating experience and technical performance. “Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive, including around mouthfeel and texture - properties that are really lacking in plant-based cheese,” Radman said. The company also found its mozzarella performs across a range of commercial kitchen environments for other menu items. “It’s a huge plus that our cheese cooks from 500° up to 950° in wood-fired, gas and electric ovens, and has performed exceptionally well in other dishes like mozzarella sticks, grilled cheese, arancini balls and cheese crisps,” she said. Longer term, animal-free casein can compete with both conventional dairy and plant-based alternatives on performance and eventually on cost, according to Radman. “The beauty of animal-free casein is it can meet the taste, texture and performance bar of conventional dairy while meeting the health and sustainability bar of plant-based products,” she said. And if animal-free cheese can deliver where plant-based cheese has struggled , New Culture sees significant room for growth. “We are confident that offering a phenomenal animal-free cheese will immediately shoot up sales in the cheese segment just like we’re seeing in milk,” she said.