For the founders of California-based start-up Perfect Day Inc, Ryan Pandya, 30, and Perumal Gandhi, 31, an interest in reducing the impact of our diets on the planet, led to the development of “whey protein”.

“We looked into what makes milk and realised that the key is the protein,” says Pandya, recounting how giving up dairy products was the hardest part of their effort to cut out animal products from their diet.

With both Pandya and Gandhi having a biomedical engineering background, Perfect Day was founded in 2014, to develop new ways of making food, with a gentler footprint on nature. Their team developed the world’s first, completely animal-free way of making milk protein that’s identical to what’s found in cows milk, through “precision fermentation”, Pandya told businessline.

“We’ve developed a way to use fermentation that’s quite similar to how the medical industry makes medicines and active pharmaceutical ingredients,” he said. The same kind of methodology is used “to create any protein we want, at a cost that’s low enough and a purity that’s high enough to be used in food,” he added.

Their flagship product that debuted in 2020 is sold in the United States, Hong Kong etc. In June 2022, they obtained approvals from the FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India), to sell their protein in India as well, Pandya said.

Sterling acquisition

Having recently completed their acquisition of Sterling Biotech (with facilities in Gujarat), bought for ₹638 crore, the long-term plan is to shore-up manufacturing and turn India into the regional hub for “nutritious and scalable and sustainable protein production”, he said. This would be for the local and export market, he added.

Sterling Biotech’s promoters are presently on the radar of the government’s enforcement authorities for economic offences. Pandya clarified that Sterling’s promoters had not joined the Perfect Day family. Only the facilities(that make high-end pharmaceutical ingredients) and 700-odd employees were taken onboard, he said.

Climate-proof food

Responding to some dairy companies’ view that milk alternatives were not milk, Pandya said, “we’ve already been working with some of the largest dairy companies in the world ... We’re not here to try to disrupt. We’d rather view it as a collaboration and frankly, the dairy industry agrees.” Pointing out that everyone was interested in giving consumers a choice, he said, “from the dairy industries’ perspective, if there’s a consumer out there that they can reach with the product that they aren’t selling yet and they can offer a way for them to do so, they are more than happy.”

As investors look at climate change-proof food companies and start-ups looking at animal-product-alternatives, Pandya said, “We often find ourselves talking about things like emissions and less use of resources in the US....but I think what is really important... is resilience with respect to something like drought or changing weather patterns that might make it more difficult to grow animal protein. We view precision fermentation as a much more climate-proof, future-proof way of creating nutrition that’s reliable for people...come what may in the future.”

Perfect Day has an ingredient innovation arm, a consumer products division (with multiple brands available internationally) and an enterprise biology arm (that allows companies to leverage their technology and build products). It has a 100-people strong research centre in Bengaluru.