Flora-based vegan dairy commercialization: Perfect Day closes US$140m funding round

12 Dec 2019 --- US-based Perfect Day, a start-up focusing on the development and production of flora-based vegan dairy, is one step closer to commercialization thanks to the closing of a US$140 million Series C funding round, led by Singaporean holding company Temasek. This third round of investing will be used to accelerate Perfect Day’s business growth through the expansion of its production capacity, going deeper with partner opportunities and extending its product portfolio. The company plans to announce its first commercial partnerships early in 2020.

“We see this funding as a facilitator to help Perfect Day enter more into the commercial space and bring this to the world in a big way. At a top-line, we’ll use the money for resourcing, ability to produce and marketing,” Ryan Pandya, CEO and Co-Founder of Perfect Day, tells FoodIngredientsFirst. 

The funding will ensure the company has the resources and teams in place for product launches and partnerships. It will also go toward Perfect Day’s ability to produce by meeting the demand for protein and extending the product portfolio. Finally, it will ensure the company has marketing support in place.

The company’s focus next year will be manufacturing and commercializing the protein in multiple continents, through multiple partnerships spanning different dairy product categories. “We are currently focused on opportunities in the US, but the amount of interest and mission relevance in Asia is impossible to ignore,” notes Pandya. 

He continues that the company has already tackled the biggest challenge – scale. “We’ve proven that we can scale this process, so the next hurdle will be producing at a capacity that meets demand. We’ve received so much demand for our protein, so now we’re working to finalize partnerships and get the product in the hands of consumers as quickly as possible.”

Over the summer, Perfect Day launched a limited-edition vegan ice cream with the dairy proteins, which sold out in a single day. Pandya highlights this as evidence that the flora-based protein delivers on the dairy experience. 

Perfect Day hopes to be active in multiple product categories.Perfect Day’s proteins are identical to those found in cow’s milk. However, instead of being sourced from the animal, the dairy proteins are created through a fermentation process similar to the manufacture of vitamins and amino acids. By adding genes essential to producing milk protein to Trichoderma – a type of microflora – the dairy flora ferments plant sugar into whey and casein.

Last month, the company embarked on adding milk lipids to its portfolio. Perfect Day sees flora-based milkfat as a similarly sized project as protein, which works on the same fermentation platform. Pandya anticipates securing similar amounts of funding for the milkfat initiative. However, these latest investments were secured following the release of the ice cream and prior to the milkfat announcement. 

Horizons Ventures, which led Perfect Day’s Series B funding earlier this year, returned to support the company’s growth, alongside other past investors. This round brings Perfect Day’s cumulative funding to over US$200 million.

The market has been rife with vegan alternatives to traditional dairy. Last month, plant-based dairy brand Eclipse Foods debuted in the US with an ice cream partnership with OddFellows in New York City and Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco. The following week, Israeli start-up ChickP launched a line of “next-generation” chickpea isolates especially designed for plant-based dairy alternative products. 

By Katherine Durrell