How vegan cheese is made: starch, cultured nuts, and fermented casein

Pick up a bag of shredded vegan mozzarella or a stack of vegan cheddar slices from a mainstream brand and the ingredient list usually starts with water, refined coconut oil, and a modified starch, potato or tapioca, before anything resembling a protein shows up. This is the workhorse formula behind most of the shredded and sliced category: cook the starch with water until the granules swell and gelatinize, around 60C to 70C depending on the starch, whisk in melted coconut oil to form an emulsion, add salt, acid (usually lactic acid) and flavour compounds, then set the mixture in a mold or extrude it and chill it into a solid block.

The starch does the job casein does in dairy cheese: it is what gives the block body at room temperature and lets it flow when heated. Tapioca and waxy potato starches are favoured over ordinary corn starch because their swollen granules produce longer melt-stretch strands, the property a 2023 study in Food Hydrocolloids specifically measured by comparing starch types in vegan cheese analogues. Coconut oil is chosen less for flavour than for its fat profile: it is solid at room temperature and liquefies over a narrow range around body heat, which is why a slice feels firm in the fridge and turns fluid quickly under a broiler.

A smaller, pricier category treats plant cheese as actual cheesemaking rather than food engineering. Soaked cashews or blanched almonds are blended into a paste, inoculated with the same or closely related lactic acid bacteria strains used on dairy, Lactococcus, Pediococcus and Weissella species show up repeatedly in microbial surveys of fermented cashew cheese, and left to acidify for one to several days. The bacteria consume sugars in the nut paste and excrete lactic acid, dropping the pH and building the tang that reads as cheese rather than nut butter.

Some makers stop there and sell a fresh, spreadable cultured cheese. Others push further: they inoculate the surface with Penicillium candidum or Penicillium roqueforti, the same rind-forming molds used on camembert and blue dairy cheese, and age the wheels for several weeks. Home and small-batch cheesemakers report an arc similar to what dairy affineurs describe: an early wheel tastes too sharply lactic, and rounded, savoury complexity only develops over subsequent weeks as the mold breaks down proteins and fats at the surface, though exact timing varies by maker and no standard duration is established. This route produces more protein than the starch-and-oil cheeses, cashews run around 18g protein per 100g raw versus almost none surviving into a starch-based block, but it does not melt or stretch the way a mozzarella shred does, because nut proteins do not form the same network dairy casein does.

The newest route does not substitute for casein at all. It makes casein, the actual dairy protein, using microorganisms engineered with the cow’s genetic instructions for the protein, grown in fermentation tanks the way insulin or rennet enzymes have been produced for decades. California-based New Culture says it was the first company to reach this milestone: in February 2024 it self-affirmed Generally Recognized as Safe, GRAS, status for its precision-fermented alpha-s1 casein after an independent expert panel review, the standard US pathway that lets a company sell an ingredient without waiting for the FDA to issue its own letter. New Culture submitted its animal-free mozzarella product label to the California Department of Food and Agriculture in January 2025 and has been supplying pizzerias including Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles; a US patent covering the product, granted and reported in July 2026, described the finished mozzarella as precision-fermented alpha-s1 casein combined with plant oils, salts, sugars and minerals.

Paris-based Standing Ovation is chasing the same protein by a different route, fermenting casein from dairy side streams including acid whey, and in 2026 it raised 30 million euros (about $34.2 million) in a Series B round backed by Bel Group and Danone to fund a US commercial rollout. As of that raise, Standing Ovation had not yet filed its EU novel food dossier with the European Food Safety Authority, and the company itself has said EU approval realistically would not land before the end of 2027 even in an optimistic scenario; it separately hopes for an FDA no-questions letter on its GRAS status by the end of 2026. No fermentation-derived casein cheese was approved for retail sale in the European Union as of this writing. This route is the only one of the four aiming to reproduce dairy cheese’s actual melt and stretch mechanism rather than fake it, but it is not yet a shelf-stable, widely available product; it exists in foodservice pilots and pending regulatory filings, not in a typical supermarket dairy case.

Soy protein isolate produces a firmer, less starch-dependent cheese and carries more protein into the finished product, plus a fat profile that is mostly unsaturated rather than the saturated fat coconut oil contributes. Oat-based cheeses lean on oat protein concentrate and often blend in the same starches used in the coconut route for melt, landing somewhere between the two on texture. Pea protein shows up as a minor add-in in several commercial formulas for body and a faint eggy note that some brands mask with flavouring. None of these bases behaves like dairy protein on its own, and all of them still lean on starch or oil emulsions to get anywhere near a melt.

Dairy cheese melts and stretches because of a specific protein structure, not because of fat content. Milk casein exists in micelles, spherical clusters of four casein types held together by calcium phosphate bridges. Kappa-casein sits on the micelle surface and keeps the whole structure suspended in liquid milk. Rennet or an acid cuts kappa-casein at a specific bond, removing the part that keeps micelles apart, and the exposed para-casein clumps into curd. As that curd is worked, stretched and warmed during cheesemaking, the calcium phosphate glue dissolves further and the casein molecules rearrange into a continuous, elastic network, which is what lets a mozzarella ball pull into a single unbroken strand. Research summarized by the Center for Dairy Research notes that kappa-casein itself actually resists melt, while beta-casein is the fraction responsible for stretch, so the balance between the two casein types decides how a given cheese behaves under heat.

Starch has no equivalent mechanism. When a starch-and-oil vegan cheese heats up, the starch granules that gelatinized during manufacture simply resoften and the coconut oil melts alongside them, producing flow and some stretch through the starch’s own polymer chains tangling as they hydrate. It is a genuinely different physical process arriving at a visually similar result, which is why starch-based vegan cheeses tend to go from solid to runny with a narrower window than dairy mozzarella, and why they set back into a firmer, sometimes rubbery texture as they cool, since the starch is re-forming its gel network rather than a protein resettling. This is the specific gap precision-fermented casein is built to close, because it is not an analogue reaction, it is the same protein doing the same job.

Fresh dairy curd does not taste like aged cheddar either; that flavour comes from months of enzymatic and microbial work on proteins and fats. Vegan cheesemakers borrow pieces of that chemistry directly. Nutritional yeast, inactivated Saccharomyces cerevisiae, contributes glutamates and B vitamins that read as savoury and umami, and it is doing the heaviest lifting in cheeses that skip fermentation entirely. Lactic acid, produced industrially by fermenting corn or beet sugar with Lactobacillus bacteria rather than extracted from milk, supplies the tang without any culturing time. Cultured dextrose, a fermented corn sugar preparation, adds a rounder fermented note and doubles as a natural preservative in some formulas. A few manufacturers add specific enzymes, lipases in particular, that break down plant fats into the same short-chain fatty acids that give aged dairy cheeses their sharper, sometimes goaty notes.

This is also why aged plant cheeses, the cultured cashew wheels and the handful of starch-based products that undergo their own short fermentation, taste noticeably closer to dairy than a fresh, unfermented block does. Time and live cultures build the same categories of flavour compounds, esters, free fatty acids, sulfur compounds, that dairy affinage builds, even when the starting protein is a cashew rather than a cow. A young, unfermented starch cheese has none of that head start and relies entirely on added flavourings to get there.

Yes, in the same sense most sliced and shredded dairy cheese is processed. Starch-and-oil vegan cheese is an engineered emulsion built from refined oil, isolated starch, stabilizers like carrageenan or gellan gum in some formulas, and flavour additives, closer in manufacturing terms to American cheese product than to a traditional wheel. Cultured cashew cheese sits at the other end, closer to farmhouse cheesemaking with a nut base swapped in for milk. Precision-fermented casein cheese is processed in the sense that any fermentation-derived ingredient is, brewed in a bioreactor and purified, though the protein itself is chemically identical to the dairy version once isolated.