Synthetic milks will be complementary to not competitive with cow’s milk and it will be some time before they can offer all the benefits of dairy, Fonterra’s chief scientist Dr Jeremy Hill says.
“It is going to be extremely difficult for synthetics to match the properties of cow’s milk and we are very confident there will always be a market for our pasture-based milk and dairy products.
“The world needs to feed 10 billion people by 2050 and so we are going to need nutrition from animal, plant and potentially synthetic sources.
“As a company really committed to innovation, sustainable food production and strong returns to our farmers we look at all new opportunities.
“We are taking synthetics seriously and all alternative sources of products but in a complementary way,” Hill said.
Within the 10b projected population there would be 2b to 3b more middle-income consumers who would want and could pay for authentic dairy products from New Zealand pasture-based systems.
Fonterra wasn’t doing research into synthetic dairy production but it was keeping tabs on the viability of the processes and consumer attitudes to dairy alternatives.
Those alternatives might be required to help feed the lower economic levels of 10b people but Fonterra was convinced they would be complementary to traditional means.
Hill was commenting on the flood of media reports that NZ pastoralism was under threat from synthetic meat and dairy foods and that the dairy sector was ignoring the problem in the same way the crossbred wool sector did over synthetic carpets.
He was just back from the International Dairy Federation (IDF) World Dairy Summit in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was about to return to Europe for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, in Bonn, Germany.
Hill was president and chairman of the IDF board between 2012 and 2016 and had been chief science and technology officer for more than 10 years.
The Government’s chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, said last month he thought most milk sold in 20 to 25 years would be synthetic.
Any concerns about taste, the scalability of manufacture, regulatory issues and consumer acceptance had either already been addressed or soon would be.
Gluckman said major NZ companies like Fonterra were already talking about synthetic alternatives.
Hill said cow’s milk was a complex mixture of nutritional components, including proteins, fats and other nutrients.
They weren’t just mixed together but interacted in ways that provided extra nutritional and health-promoting benefits.
“Replicating that is an awful long way away,” he said.
White fluids with some of the characteristics of cow’s milk had been around for a long time, in the form of plant-based substitutes.
Hill said there was a growing body of evidence that food products, especially dairy-derived, were more than the sum of their components.
“Milk, cheese, yoghurts have health benefits that cannot simply be explained by their nutrients.
While plant-based substitutes and synthetics were improving in that respect, the health benefits from consuming the recommended daily intakes of dairy products were being demonstrated.
“Two studies in the United States and one in Australia showed that the reductions in health costs were in the billions of dollars a year.”
Complex milk lipids extracted from milk fat could have quite significant cognitive benefits.
New benefits of dairy products and components were being discovered all the time.
“This is not surprising because milk is a food itself, one of the few naturally occurring products that is.”
Hydration benefits from cow’s milk along with energy and the muscle repair were being recognised by athletes.
Again, new-borns were at their most vulnerable from dehydration so milk was not only providing nutrients but also hydration.
“We also know that fat in dairy products doesn’t behave in the same way that the individual fatty acids would lead you to believe.
“Evidence has now been gathered that the proposed cardio-vascular negative effects of dairy fat consumption do not occur.
“Dairy is now a heart-healthy food whereas it was previously seen as unhealthy.”
While all food chains needed to improve their environmental performance no life cycle comparisons were yet available between dairy and synthetics, Hill said.
“We know from the comparisons made between dairy and the plant-based alternatives that they can have a high footprint.
“For example, soy-based drinks had twice the carbon footprint of dairy.
“Plant-based systems have to include the soil carbon release by ploughing.”
Synthetics would need to provide some of the scientific studies of consumption and sustainable production that dairy had accumulated over decades.
Without a product yet on the market, the company Perfect Day in San Francisco had made claims it would sell animal-free dairy products that tasted like the real thing.
The Silicon Valley start-up said “Our mission is to empower you to enjoy the dairy foods you love while making the world a kinder, greener place – no compromise required.”
Hill said synthetic milk had to start with biomass feedstock and add a considerable amount of energy to enable the yeasts to convert basic compounds into proteins.
“The mixes have to be heated and oxygenated on a large scale.
“While I don’t want to over-emphasise the negatives that company also doesn’t have anything to back its positives and I think the consumer needs to know all of that to make an informed choice.”
Perfect Day said its products would have no cholesterol, lactose or bacteria.
Founded in 2014 as Muufri, the renamed Perfect Day had said a number of times its synthetic milk and dairy products like pizza cheese would be on the market next year – but the 2017 expectation had not come to pass.
