Forget Lab-Grown Meat—You Can Now Buy Lab-Grown Ice Cream

Even though “dairy-free” doesn’t necessarily mean “healthier,” it’s still a necessary disclaimer for dairy-free people who are screaming for ice cream. And between veganism, lactose intolerance, and other dietary dairy restrictions, the race is on to create an ice cream for the masses that doesn’t taste like chalk, chemicals, or sadness.

Bay Area startup Perfect Day may have just pulled ahead of the competition. Today, Fast Company reports, it released three flavors of dairy-free ice cream—Vanilla Salted Fudge, Milky Chocolate, and Vanilla Blackberry Toffee—that contain the same proteins found in cow dairy, but grown in a lab from engineered yeast and DNA. Since those proteins contribute greatly to the rich texture and taste of ice cream that we love so much, Perfect Day’s products are supposedly indistinguishable from the real thing.

The co-founders, vegan bioengineers Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi, got the idea from their experience in medicine, where fermentation is used to grow things in a lab all the time. “The two of us started scratching our heads and wondering, what if we just apply that same exact technology that’s been around for half a century to make the world’s most in-demand, highest-quality protein?” Pandya explained to Fast Company.

Their lactose-, dairy-, and gluten-free vegan ice cream, which they’ve been working on for five years, includes the dairy proteins casein and whey, as well as plant-based fats and sugar. If you're dairy-free because of a casein or whey allergy or sensitivity, you should treat this ice cream like you would any other foods containing dairy, and heed the "Contains milk protein" disclaimer on Perfect Day products.

Lab-grown dairy has environmental benefits too, considering that cows and other livestock are major culprits of greenhouse gas emissions. Pandya and Gandhi hope to sell their proteins to large-scale food manufacturers, and have teamed up with Archer Daniels Midland, an Illinois-based food processing company, to increase production.

Though it seems like a scoop or two of this ice cream might be the recipe for a perfect day, that wasn’t the inspiration behind the company’s name—the founders stumbled upon a study in which scientists discovered that cows produced more milk when listening to music, and one of the most successful songs was Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” “As a company on a mission to make cows, people, and the planet happier, it seemed like a perfect fit,” the website says.

Can’t wait to taste the magic? You can purchase all three flavors in a three-pint bundle for $60 here.

[h/t Fast Company]