Their ice cream brand is called Brave Robot, and it offers eight different flavors made from lab-grown vegan milk containing Perfect Day’s whey protein. Together with dairy product developer Paul Kollesoff, Perfect Day co-founded The Urgent Company and started developing sustainable food products, with the first being vegan ice-cream. In 2020, the FDA recognized Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein as safe to eat, thus opening the doors to new alternatives to classic dairy products. The powder can then be mixed with fat, water, and other ingredients to make lab-grown vegan milk, cheese, or other products. As reported by FreeThink, these proteins can then be separated from the yeast and dried into a powder that’s molecularly identical to whey protein from cows. Working together with Isha Datar, executive director of a cellular agriculture research institute called New Harvest, the trio created a startup called Perfect Day and developed a process that uses genetically engineered yeast to produce the two main proteins found in cow’s milk: casein and whey. That’s why vegan bioengineers Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi have dedicated years to developing a milk alternative that not only tastes like the real thing but also has the same molecular composition. Cutting down or eliminating dairy consumption is one way we can personally spur reductions in dairy emissions, but when things such as ice cream taste as good as they do, it’s pretty difficult to persuade people to stay away.

The dairy industry is a major culprit when it comes to global carbon emissions, emitting nearly as much as the shipping and aviation industries combined.

Brave robot vegan ice cream