Tag: lab-based milk

Lab-Based Dairy is So Boring

Posted on by Rachel Ravencraft

It’s strange to admit, but as more and more consumers react negatively to the lack of nutrition and marketing honesty in plant-based and lab-based beverages, news of their falling sales, struggling stock prices and consumer skepticism has become almost … boring.  

But being boring is one thing. Being Bored is another level entirely. Let’s explain. 

Two years ago, when “lab-based” milk seemed to be promising some more of the same mislabeling craziness that plant-based dairy imposters have been foisting on consumers for decades, an over-hyped beverage called “Bored Cow” entered the marketplace.  

Promising “animal-free dairy milk,” (which, per FDA standards of identity, is impossible), Bored Cow played the same trick as other purported lab-based milk imitators — it fermented one dairy protein (out of hundreds of milk’s total chemical components), added a bunch of other stuff to it, and decided to market it as milk, complete with spurious sustainability claims and promises to “fix our food system,” etc.  

NMPF complained to the FDA, and, as has been customary with FDA for the past several decades when it comes to dairy terms, very little happened. But another place where little seems to be happening is … Bored Cow’s sales. Once the hype died down, did Bored Cow just … wander away? 

A look at the company website, tryboredcow.com, returns a message saying “Sorry, this store is unavailable.” Same thing happens to the website of one of its two corporate parents, the venture-capital-established Tomorrow Farms. Bored Cow’s Instagram page was last updated last August.  

Perfect Day, the other entity from which Bored Cow was spawned, at least still has an active web presence. The company is active enough, in fact, to get sued by the Organic Consumers Association for peddling Bored Cow as milk when it’s actually, as alleged in the lawsuit, about 87% fungus, among other things. (You can see why they’d prefer to associate with dairy, with limited fungus demand among American beverage consumers.) According to an article detailing the suit, Bored Cow has become a bit of a distraction for Perfect Day, which in 2023 pivoted to building business-to-business relationships with large consumer products companies and didn’t want to focus on brands. 

Multiple requests for comment from Perfect Day were not returned. Bored Cow doesn’t seem to have any contact information.  

To be sure, Bored Cow still seems to exist. Target and Walmart are selling it, and UberEats says it can deliver you some in an hour if you’d like. But if this is the lab-based revolution, it’s a bit underwhelming. Sales of real milk are up, dairy investment is booming, and the return to milk (and the turning away from alternatives) is genuine. Proving yet again that reports of the death of dairy a few years ago were greatly exaggerated. Now it seems like it’s the one-time wave of the future that’s on life support.  

An interesting thought. But it’s also one that’s become so obvious that’s it’s getting a little … you know.   

NMPF’s Detlefsen on the Scourge of Lab-Based Milk Imposters

Posted on by Alan Bjerga

 

NMPF Chief Counsel Clay Detlefsen discusses the even more urgent need for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enforce beverage standards of identity as lab-based milk imposters try to use dairy terms in the marketplace. “Milk has got 13 essential nutrients. It’s got 400 different fatty acids. It’s got two categories of proteins, casein and whey, numerous micronutrients,” he said. “You cannot replicate that in a laboratory or elsewhere. I mean milk is milk. It’s natural, and it’s good for you. And you can’t duplicate that in the lab.” Detlefsen spoke in an interview with the National Association of Farm Broadcasters.

Need for Lab-Based Beverage Action as Clear as a Milk Label

Posted on by Theresa Sweeney

It’s the difference between

“Water, animal-free whey protein (from fermentation), sunflower oil, sugar, less than 1% of: vitamin A, vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin), vitamin D2, riboflavin, citrus fiber, salt, dipotassium phosphate, acacia, gellan gum, mixed tocopherols (antioxidant), calcium potassium phosphate citrate, natural flavor,” …

and this:

We’ve warned FDA of the problems resulting from this fabrication, and we hope our warning doesn’t fall on deaf ears. After more than four decades of plant-based imposters using dairy terms that violate the agency’s Standard of Identity for milk, lab-based fermenters of single dairy proteins are trying to mislead consumers in the exact same way – by creating a false impression that their slurries of highly processed ingredients are equivalent to dairy.

They’re not. And consumers shouldn’t be led to believe otherwise.

In a letter to FDA asking the agency to take action against the brand Bored Cow, which is marketing its beverage as “animal-free dairy milk” because it uses a single fermented whey protein (real milk has dozens of protein variants and literally hundreds of different fatty acids), the National Milk Producers Federation notes that “it is baseless, preposterous and absurd” to call such a product milk.

“In the interest of public health, the misleading labeling charade must end before it gets out of hand,” NMPF writes. “FDA must act, and must do so now.”

Will it? While FDA’s proposed guidance on the naming of plant-based beverages finally admits a problem, the lab-based conundrum shows how its purported solution – allowing imitators to use the term “milk” if they disclose nutritional differences – falls short. It’s not just about the limited nutrition knowledge we have. It’s about the substance itself, and the complex interaction among naturally-occurring  ingredients that any honest marketer, scientist or regulator knows we don’t fully understand. That humility, and the need to protect against consumer confusion that’s been acknowledged by the last three FDA commissioners, is more than enough reason to take action now.

Because without it, the imposters will proliferate, the headaches will grow, and the marketplace will only become less transparent, in yet another abandonment of FDA’s mission to protect consumers. FDA must enforce its Standard of Identity rules on lab-based dairy labeling now. The need is as basic as the ingredient listing on a bottle of milk. FDA can’t let that clear principle be dragged through the mud – or whatever substances these fake “milks” are made of.