Taste testing the ice cream that cost $60 million to create in a lab

Presumably consumers motivated solely by animal welfare and environmental concerns about livestock rearing will be happy to buy it. But that comprises only three percent of people seeking plant-based alternatives. For people who choose dairy-free products because they believe that dairy proteins are actually detrimental to their health, it seems like this may not be an ice cream that will suit their preferences.

When you consider just who’s actually buying the plant-based meats and milks on the market now, it’s pretty clear that vegans are a tiny fraction. The fact that Impossible Whoppers at Burger King come with egg-based mayo as the default condiment speaks volumes about who Big Food is trying to attract. Even Tyson Foods’ new meat-free chicken nuggets include egg whites as a binder, essentially telling vegans: We don’t need your business. And for Perfect Day to succeed, it will certainly have to appeal to a much wider audience than vegans. 

I don’t doubt that the novelty of such an item will compel a thousand consumers to place their orders this week for Perfect Day’s new ice cream. But if the product isn’t necessarily better for the planet or your health than other vegan ice creams (and at least for now is more expensive), what’s the motivating factor that would drive sales in the long-term? Sure, some sci-fi fans may revel in eating a futuristic food, but the most realistic answer for the masses will simply come down to taste.

You’ve surely heard about the efforts to grow “clean meat,” or real meat grown without raising and slaughtering animals. What Perfect Day is doing is quite different, even if the end result is similar. Unlike companies such as JUST which are growing real animal meat from microscopic animal cells, Perfect Day never needs a donor animal in the picture at all, which is why they label their ingredient as “non-animal whey protein” and suitable for vegans. To clarify further, the ice cream pint packaging advertises that Perfect Day’s whey protein is “identical to protein from cow’s milk—but 100% animal-free.”

The process is pretty familiar even to the scientifically illiterate. Imagine taking brewer’s yeast and feeding it sugar. You know the result: alcohol. Or if you feed sugar to baker’s yeast, you get carbon dioxide to make your bread rise. Perfect Day uses a yeast that when fed sugar produces whey protein. In fact, the same process has been used for decades to make the rennet in most hard cheeses you eat today.

Enter the samples.

Pandya and Gandhi perched on the edge of their seats on the other side of the conference room table as a team of their culinary experts provided my own personal buffet of ice creams to try. Perfect Day’s varieties sat on one side of the tray while an anonymous “leading brand” of dairy-free chocolate brownie ice cream that looked remarkably like Ben & Jerry’s (yes, as my wife can attest, I eat enough of it to tell by appearance alone) faced them. 

I read the label on the carton: The primary ingredients, in order, are water, sugar, coconut oil, sunflower oil, and then “non-animal whey protein,” followed by minor ingredients comprising less than two percent of the pint. 

Of course dairy-based ice cream usually doesn’t have whey protein as a stand-alone ingredient. It was hard to predict how this new take on the product would perform, especially considering the whey protein comprises a fairly small portion of the pint, being the fifth ingredient.

Perhaps I should’ve started with the baseline product they’re competing against, but the intrigue of animal-free whey dominated, leading me to push a silver spoon through the light-brown Perfect Day scoop. The chocolate sphere parted for my utensil the way a good ice cream would. When I put it in my mouth, it melted like it should, too. I made a joke about it being hard to go wrong with a frozen combination of fat and sugar. But it was when I tasted the dairy-free competitor that I did indeed notice it appeared to be somewhat less creamy than the Perfect Day variety. 

I’m open to the possibility that it was in my mind since I knew which sample was which. Rest assured that for the sake of (ahem) science, I conducted the test several times, confirming my initial observation. Perhaps a sharper contrast would be drawn with animal-based ice creams. You can make that evaluation yourself—if you’re one of the first 1,000 in (Editor’s note: The author of this piece is vegan.) 

A new cow-free dairy ice cream on the market is certainly an interesting novelty, but Perfect Day’s founders, both young vegans, claim a loftier vision. On a warming planet where animal agriculture is a leading contributor to climate change and animal welfare exposés often reveal harsh treatment of dairy cows and other farm animals, the idea of producing actual animal products without animals is certainly appealing to many. 

No doubt there will be some for whom the marriage of such technology and food won’t be appetizing. Other (perhaps less socially conscious) consumers will wonder why a product like Perfect Day’s needs to exist at all. The company’s success will depend on convincing a potentially leery consumer base that its product is worth a higher price tag, and preferable to both traditional dairy desserts and plant-based competitors.

Perfect Day’s release does make it clearer than ever that commercialization of animal-free animal products isn’t a futuristic Jetsons scenario. Now that you can eat real ice cream without a single trace of cow, what could possibly come next?