Lab-grown cheese is coming to US pizzerias. The FDA never approved it, and it isn't dairy-free
A Kraft Heinz-backed startup ferments cow casein without the cow. The FDA never reviewed it, and because the protein is identical to milk casein, this 'vegan' cheese is not dairy-free.
Emily Harper
Lab-grown cheese is real, it is coming to American pizzerias, and almost nothing you assume about how it got here is correct.
The company is New Culture, based in San Francisco. It takes the cow gene that codes for casein — the protein that makes cheese stretch, melt, and brown — puts it into a microbe, and ferments that microbe in steel tanks until it produces the protein on its own. No herd, no udder, no milk. The company calls the result "animal-free dairy." The press has mostly called it vegan mozzarella. Its largest early backer is the venture fund of Kraft Heinz.
Three short answers before the details, because these are the three things people actually want to know:
- Did the FDA approve it? No. New Culture declared its own ingredient safe under a legal pathway called self-affirmed GRAS, and never needed a decision from the agency.
- Is it dairy-free? No. The casein is bioidentical to cow casein, so it is still a milk allergen. The company says so itself.
- Can you buy it yet? Not quite. The launch has been held up — not by the FDA, but by a California label registration.
Put those three together and you get the scenario worth thinking about. A pizza sold as animal-free. Ordered by someone who has spent their entire life reading "animal-free" as "safe for me." Containing a protein their immune system cannot tell apart from cow's milk. Nobody in that chain has broken a single law.
What is lab-grown cheese, and what's actually in it?
"Lab-grown" is doing a lot of work in that phrase. Nothing here is grown from animal cells the way lab-grown meat is. This is precision fermentation: the same industrial process that has made insulin and the recombinant chymosin used to set roughly 90% of American cheese for decades. A microbe is given a gene and told to make one protein.
The casein is the headline, but it isn't most of the cheese. New Culture's published ingredient deck is: recombinant casein protein, water, sunflower oil, coconut oil, salt, sugar, food starch, and fortifying minerals. Green Queen
So the structural protein comes out of a fermentation tank and the fat comes out of a sunflower and a coconut. And there is deliberately less of the protein than you'd get from a cow: the company's pitch is that its casein performs so well it can build restaurant-quality mozzarella with "50%+ less casein than conventional mozzarella" — which it frames, correctly, as the milestone that gets it to cost parity with dairy. AgFunderNews
On the company's own comparison, that lands at 5g of protein and 2g of carbs per serving, against 6g and under 1g for conventional mozzarella. Better than plant-based cheese, which is mostly starch and oil with 0g of protein. Not better than cheese. If you've read our breakdown of what's in a frozen pizza's imitation mozzarella, the shape of the ingredient list will look familiar: oil and starch doing the work that milk fat used to do.
Did the FDA approve lab-grown cheese?
No. And it never had to.
Under the "generally recognized as safe" pathway, a company introducing a new ingredient has two options. It can file a GRAS notice with the FDA and wait for a letter back saying the agency has no questions. Or it can convene its own panel of qualified experts, have that panel conclude the ingredient is safe, and start selling — without telling the FDA that any of it happened.
That second route is called self-affirmed GRAS, and it is what New Culture used. In February 2024 it self-determined GRAS status for its animal-free casein, and CEO Matt Gibson said it was the first company ever to do so for casein. At the time, the company said it would also pursue a no-questions letter from the FDA to add "an extra green light from the federal government" — meaning that as of its own announcement, it did not have one. FoodNavigator
The comparison that matters: Perfect Day, which makes precision-fermented whey protein, filed a GRAS notice in 2019 and got its no-questions letter from the FDA in 2020. FoodNavigator The federal review was available. It just isn't required.
And New Culture is one company in a very large room. Pew's analysis of the food additive system found roughly 1,000 substances that entered the food supply through self-affirmed GRAS determinations the FDA was never told about — no central record, no public list, no way for the agency to check the evidence or the credentials of the experts who signed off. Not 1,000 that were rejected. One thousand that nobody at the agency ever saw. Pew Charitable Trusts
Is lab-grown cheese vegan? Is it dairy-free?
It contains no animal product. It is not dairy-free, and if you have a milk allergy it is not safe for you.
This is the fact that gets lost in the "lab-grown" argument, and it's the one that can actually hurt somebody. The casein New Culture ferments is bioidentical to the casein in cow's milk. Same protein, same sequence, different factory. An immune system that reacts to one reacts to the other. New Culture has stated this plainly: because the animal-free casein is bioidentical to dairy casein, people with dairy allergies cannot eat it. FoodNavigator
The problem is what the marketing language does to that fact. "Animal-free," "cow-free," and "vegan" all sound to an ordinary shopper like "dairy-free." For the last thirty years they effectively were. They aren't anymore.
The UK's Food Standards Agency got worried enough about this to publish guidance in June 2026 specifically on allergen labelling for precision-fermented foods. Its warning about the whey-protein version of this technology applies word for word to casein: the protein "is a potent cow's milk allergen," products containing it "may not be suitable for consumers with a milk allergy," and — the line worth reading twice — "consumers may not expect something that might trigger an allergic reaction to be present." Food Standards Agency
The allergy organizations are not hedging about this either. FARE, the largest food allergy advocacy group in the US, tells milk-allergic consumers plainly: "if you have a milk allergy, you should avoid animal-free dairy products just like you would any other milk product" — including anything whose ingredient list says whey, casein, milk allergen, or milk protein, even when preceded by "non-animal," "animal-free," or "vegan." FARE
Now add where this product is going first. Not a grocery aisle with a label you can turn over and read. Restaurant pizza, sold to pizzerias — New Culture has said it locked in $5 million in early demand from pizza shops around the country. Green Queen
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The federal allergen law that forces a "Contains: Milk" line onto a package — FALCPA — governs packaged food. A menu is not a package. A chalkboard is not a package. The teenager taking your order is not a package. So the one legal mechanism that would catch this is the one mechanism that doesn't apply to the first place this cheese is being sold. FARE's advice for that gap is the only advice available: when in doubt at a restaurant, ask.
Ask what, though? "Is your vegan cheese vegan" gets you a yes. The question that actually protects you is whether the cheese contains fermented casein — and you have to already know that fermented casein is a thing that exists to think to ask it.
Who is funding lab-grown cheese?
New Culture was founded in 2018 by Matt Gibson and Inja Radman. Its first outside money, a $3.5 million seed round in 2019, was led by Evolv Ventures — the $100 million venture fund backed by Kraft Heinz, the company that makes Velveeta and Kraft Singles. Food Dive Kraft's fund came back for the $25 million Series A in 2021, alongside ADM Ventures and Dr. Oetker's venture arm. AgFunderNews Total raised is now around $28.5 million, with CJ CheilJedang and ADM signed up as manufacturing partners. Green Queen
This is not a fringe operation being kept out of the food supply by regulators. It is legacy packaged food buying the next version of itself, early.
What lab-grown cheese will be called on the label
It will not be called lab-grown cheese. Nothing requires that phrase, and no marketing department on earth would choose it.
On a packaged product, FALCPA does require the milk declaration, so there is a paper trail if you know the vocabulary. FARE's guidance is to look for the protein named in the ingredient list — Perfect Day's partners, for example, print "whey protein (from fermentation)" — and for a "Contains: Milk Allergen" or "Contains: Milk Protein" line underneath it. FARE
The front of the package is where the language goes soft. These are the phrases that mean a protein came out of a fermentation tank:
- animal-free dairy
- animal-free, non-animal, or cow-free casein or whey
- cultured dairy protein
- precision-fermented protein
- recombinant casein
- "real dairy protein, without the cow"
Every one of those is accurate. Not one of them is the word your brain is scanning for.
Is the FDA closing the self-affirmed GRAS loophole?
It has proposed to. The proposed rule is considerably narrower than the headlines about it.
On August 10, 2026, the FDA announced a rule to eliminate the self-affirmed GRAS pathway, published in the Federal Register the next day. Read the actual text:
- It does not create premarket approval. The FDA states outright that the program does not establish premarket review for purportedly GRAS substances. Alston & Bird
- Companies can keep selling while they notify. A substance can enter commerce before a GRAS notice is filed; noncompliance just becomes a factor in how the FDA prioritizes post-market review.
- Substances already on the market — the existing thousand — get a streamlined 12-month submission that requires identifying information and evidence of prior marketing, not a full safety dossier. Alston & Bird
There is also an open question about whether the FDA can do this at all. Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas described the rule as closing an information gap while "respecting the limitation to our authority," and outside counsel have noted the underlying problem: the statute makes GRAS notification voluntary, and it is not settled that the agency can make it mandatory by rulemaking rather than Congress. Gibson Dunn The comment period runs to December 9, 2026. Nothing about this rule pulls a single existing self-affirmed ingredient off a shelf.
When can you actually buy lab-grown cheese?
Not yet — and the reason is the strangest part of this whole story.
New Culture cleared the federal safety question in-house and moved on. What has actually held up the launch is a state label form.
The mozzarella was supposed to debut at Nancy Silverton's Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles in 2024. As of the most recent reporting, in July 2026, it still hadn't — the company was waiting on the California Department of Food and Agriculture to sign off on its label and registration, believed to be the first time the CDFA has evaluated a label for a product made with animal-free casein. Co-founder Inja Radman's own summary: "Factoring in the first-of-its-kind CDFA application, it's certainly taken longer than we wanted or expected." Green Queen
Read that sequence again. The safety determination was the fast part. The paperwork about what the package is allowed to say was the slow part. That tells you exactly which stage of this system has teeth — and it isn't the one about whether the ingredient is safe to eat.
How to check what's actually in your cheese
Here is the uncomfortable summary of everything above.
An ingredient can enter the American food supply without a single federal regulator reading the safety file. Roughly a thousand already have, and there is no public list of them, so you cannot look yours up. The one that started this article is a milk allergen wearing the word "vegan." It is arriving in restaurants first, where the allergen law doesn't reach. And the words that would tip you off — cultured, animal-free, precision-fermented — are words that were chosen specifically because they don't alarm anyone.
You are not going to out-read that with a squint at the back of a box in the dairy aisle. The vocabulary changes faster than any of us keep up with, and it is designed to.
That is the entire reason Tallow exists. Scan the barcode and you get a 0-100 score you can audit, with every ingredient named and rated in plain English — so "recombinant casein" or "cultured dairy protein" stops being a phrase you have to already know and becomes a line that tells you what it is and where it came from. Seed oils get flagged, so a mozzarella built on sunflower and coconut oil shows up as what it is. Processing level is scored. Independent lab results are attached to the product when they exist. Two seconds, at the shelf, before it goes in the cart.
The words on the front of the box are chosen by the people selling it. The list on the back is the part that has to be true. Tallow reads the back.
Eat clean. Make the label prove it.
This article is consumer information, not medical or allergy advice. If you manage a milk allergy, talk to your allergist and treat animal-free dairy as you would any milk product. Every figure above is linked to its primary source as of September 2026; product availability and regulatory status change.