Boston-based Brown Foods, a Y Combinator-backed startup company, has unveiled “UnReal Milk,” reportedly the first lab-made whole cow milk. The company says its “milk” matches the taste, texture and nutrition of conventional cow’s milk, and also can be transformed into butter, cheese, ice cream and other dairy products — without the cows.
According to its founders, UnReal Milk is made by cultivating mammary cells from cows in a lab. The cells are grown in conditions that cause them to produce milk, replicating the nutrition,traditional dairy. Brown Foods says independent third-party analysis by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, affiliated with MIT, confirmed the presence of all key dairy proteins.
Because the company is using a cell-culture approach, the company says there is no noticeable taste or texture difference between UnReal Milk and the real thing. Dr. Richard Braatz Edwin R. Gilliland Professor of chemical engineering at MIT, biopharmaceutical manufacturing expert and member of Brown Foods’ Scientific Advisory Board, says that unlike precision fermentation, Brown Foods’ technology can be scaled up further using bioreactor systems to produce mass volumes of milk for the human consumption.
Brown Foods was founded in 2021 by Sohail Gupta, Bhavna Tandon and Avhijeet Kapoor — alumni of Stanford, Rice and IIT Delhi with over 30 years of combined expertise in synthetic biology, bioprocess engineering and food innovation. Backed by investors including Y Combinator, AgFunder and Collaborative Fund, the company has raised $2.3 million to date and operates in both the U.S. and India.
The team is aiming to have UnReal Milk version 2.0 ready for consumer tasting by late 2025, followed by a market pilot in late 2026. Version 2.0 will deliver a more refined product, as the current process produces milk in a liquid solution from which it must be extracted. While some components of this solution remain in the milk, they will be completely removed in the next iteration.
Learn more at UnReal Milk’s website HERE. Brown Foods also produced a video showing how its UnReal Milk is made, available HERE.
