The Belgian precision fermentation innovators at Those Vegan Cowboys will work with global dairy supplier Interfood, HAS University of Applied Sciences green academy and sports nutrition brand XXL Nutrition to develop the next generation of functional nutrition powered by animal-free casein.
Funded by an innovation grant of €1.2 million from the EU’s OPZuid program, the firms aim to produce nutritious, tasty, affordable and sustainable alternatives at a time of growing demand from consumers, brands and retailers alike.
“With our stainless steel cow ‘Margaret’, we’re showing that casein can be made without animals. The next step is translating that protein into products people actually want to use,” said Hille van der Kaa, CEO of Those Vegan Cowboys.
She said the partners will analyze market demands and technological abilities to discover their strongest application opportunities, but suggested that recovery could be a white space for their platform.
Relevance grows amidst sourcing instability
The project comes at a time when sports nutrition stakeholders are searching for alternatives to whey amidst surging prices driven by “the mainstreaming of protein” alongside heightened demand from GLP-1 users.
Mathias Jansen, brand manager at XXL Nutrition, said this is a key reason for his firm’s exploration of alternative proteins, highlighting strong consumer demand for high-quality amino acid profiles as well as improved digestibility and tolerability.
“Through this project, we see new opportunities to introduce a protein source that combines a high quality amino acid profile with improved sustainability and better tolerability for consumers with lactose intolerance, thanks to its completely lactose-free composition,” he said.
Van der Kaa noted that while the consumer demand for ‘vegan’ and ‘plant-based’ claims has tapered since 2020, when The Vegan Cowboys first launched, the demand for sustainable alternatives is growing as the environmental impacts of products moves front-of-mind for all stakeholders.
“The industry has told us they want to have an alternative because they see the price of casein will go up in the future,” she said, adding that their alternative provides a ‘clean’ and ‘future-proof’ solution which can reduce CO2 emissions by 95%, and reduce land and water use by one fifth compared with cow-derived casein.
“We are also seeing that, from a retailer perspective, they find it very appealing if products are keeping CO2 emissions down. This is an important claim for retailers in Europe,” she said.
White space in recovery
She added that an interesting characteristic of casein, compared with whey, is its slower digestion and amino-acid release.
“Whey is very well suited to delivering protein quickly, while casein can provide protein over a longer period,” she explained, suggesting this makes it particularly interesting for longer-term recovery, including overnight solutions.
“What excites me the most is that precision fermentation allows us to do more than simply reproduce the proteins we already know from cow’s milk,” she added. “We can investigate different caseins with different functional and nutritional properties.”
Ultimately, van der Kaa said the team hopes to discover caseins and combinations of caseins which offer better functionality than those already on the market, allowing developers to target demographics with specific health concerns, such as those using GLP-1 medicines.
The partners will look to first launch commercially in the US as the EU Novel Foods approval process will likely take at least three years.
