BOSTON — A cellular agriculture startup that focuses on creating alternatives to conventional dairy, Brown Foods unveiled Feb. 25 its lab-made whole cow milk.

The company said it formulated the animal-free product called UnReal Milk not only to “match the taste, texture and nutrition of conventional cow milk,” but also for use in the production of butter, cheese, ice cream and other dairy products.

Brown Foods shared that it achieved the innovation through a “biotech-driven approach called mammalian cell culture to produce real milk.” The company noted its UnReal Milk also is different from plant-based alternative milks because the new product contains the proteins, fats and carbohydrates that are found in traditional dairy milk.

The creators of UnReal Milk said the product features the same taste, texture and functionality as traditional milk.

A member of Brown Foods’ scientific advisory board, Dr. Richard Braatz, who also is a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, called the innovation a “technological breakthrough,” as well as a significant scientific achievement.

“Unlike precision fermentation, the key strength of Brown Foods' technology approach is that it uses mammalian cell culture, which enables them to produce all components of milk together as whole milk; and their technology can be scaled up further using bioreactor systems to produce mass volumes of milk for the human consumption,” Braatz explained. “What makes this breakthrough remarkable is its scalability. This technology can be scaled to meet global demand while delivering a solution that is sustainable and resource-efficient.”

The plan going forward for Brown Foods involves bringing UnReal Milk to consumers for tasting in late 2025, with what it called version 2.0, followed by a market pilot in late 2026. Brown Foods said the second version “will deliver a more refined product, as the current process produces milk in a liquid solution from which it must be extracted.”

The company said an independent third party analysis by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, affiliated with MIT, confirmed the presence of all key dairy proteins – alpha-S1-casein, alpha-S2-casein, beta casein, kappa casein, alpha-lactalbumin, beta-lactoglobulin, lactotransferrin and albumin – in the first version of UnReal Milk.

Brown Foods chief executive officer and co-founder Sohail Gupta said protecting the planet for future generations and putting an end to animal cruelty also are key to the company’s work.

“With UnReal Milk, we’re not just offering a sustainable alternative — we’re proving that by leveraging recent advances in technology we can create nature-identical, tasty and functional food products while solving some of the biggest challenges in food production,” Gupta said.

Estimates provided by Brown Foods stated UnReal Milk, compared to conventional dairy, offers an 82% lower carbon footprint, the use of 90% less water and 95% less land usage.