The vegan food market was pegged as a $27 billion industry last year, a figure that's expected to more than double within a decade. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the major food and beverage incumbents such as Nestlé, which launched a plant-based dairy line under the Wunda brand last year, while rival Unilever has been doubling down on its vegan offerings.

But any company looking to develop successful plant-based food alternatives often face challenges when trying to replicate certain goods traditionally made from animal-based ingredients. Dairy, in particular, has its problems, as recreating the "creaminess" without using real cream isn't easy -- and existing dairy-free solutions such as coconut oil or palm oil aren't all that sustainable from an environmental standpoint.

This is something that Swiss startup Cultivated Biosciences is setting out to solve, through creating something akin to high-fat cream using a GMO-free yeast fermentation process.

Mouthfeel

Founded out of Zurich in 2021 by Tomas Turner and Dimitri Zogg, Cultivated Biosciences is one of countless companies working in a sustainable food space that's working to reduce humans' dependency on animals for sustenance, spanning everything from chicken and seafood, to sausages. Dairy is also garnering significant attentions from entrepreneurs and investors the world over, with the likes of Brown Foods recently raising cash to develop cell-cultured "cowless" milk in a lab, while Better Dairy and New Culture are using precision fermentation techniques to help provide the necessary milk proteins lacking in other dairy-free alternatives.

Cultivated Biosciences, for its part, is tackling the problem from a slightly different angle -- it's focusing squarely on the "texture" to help vegan food producers create goods that "feel" closer to the real McCoy.

"We are working on the fat and surrounding microstructure component that give dairy its amazing mouthfeel," CEO Tomas Turner explained to TechCrunch. "We have developed a fat-rich ingredient that you can imagine as a 20% fat cream, with a mouthfeel and colour indistinguishable from dairy."