All Ryan Pandya wanted was a bagel with some decent vegan cream cheese. One afternoon on a lunch break in 2014, he drove out of his way to stop at a Boston-area bakery and placed his order. But once he was back in his car for an eagerly anticipated bite, the soy-based cream cheese offered all the texture and flavor of a melted water balloon—a lackluster culinary experience he paid a plantbased premium to have.
Fast-forward seven years, and that fateful bagel encounter is a world away for Pandya, now the CEO and co-founder of Perfect Day, a Bay Area startup that specializes in making dairy products without a single animal cell. In part, he has the disappointing vegan cream cheese to thank, since it prompted Pandya, who has a background in chemical and biological engineering, to ask why such a plant-based dairy substitute seemed to be the best that 21st-century food scientists could come up with. “I came back to my office and thought, ‘Let’s figure this out,’” he says. “I began researching the composition of milk and what it is in there that is missing in soy milk.” He quickly discovered the answer, as it turns out, is
