“This is our cow,” says Adam Lowry, CEO of Ripple, a Silicon Valley startup known for making milk from peas. He’s pointing at a small tabletop homogenizer, a device that blends fat, sugar, and protein to test milk recipes in the company’s small lab in Emeryville, California. The company’s goal: to make plant-based dairy products that anyone, including non-vegans, will actually want to eat and drink.
At the base of the products is a proprietary ingredient the company calls Ripptein, made in a patent-pending process that the company says strips out the flavor of plant material and leaves almost purely protein, so its milk product doesn’t taste like peas. And after a successful launch in 2015, the company is now poised to expand its pea-based dairy offerings: half-and-half and Greek yogurt that the company says will have the same protein content as dairy products (and, ideally, the same taste), with a fraction of the footprint.
“From a biochemical standpoint, milk is protein, and fat, and sugar,” says Neil Renninger, cofounder and co-CEO at Ripple. “There are plenty of plant sugars you can use, and plenty of plant fats. There are also plenty of plant proteins you can use, but the problem is that they all taste like the plant they derive from. We had to figure out how to make a plant protein that didn’t taste like a plant protein.”
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