Precision fermentation produces animal proteins — whey, casein, egg white, and more — using microorganisms without animal farming, offering significant animal welfare benefits at scale.
Precision fermentation represents one of the most important near-term opportunities for reducing animal welfare harm in food systems. Unlike cultivated meat, which remains expensive and faces significant scale-up challenges, precision fermentation has already achieved commercial production and market entry in several product categories. Its welfare significance lies in enabling food products that consumers know and value — cheese that melts like dairy cheese, egg white that bakes identically to conventional egg — without the animal welfare costs of conventional production. The cheese and dairy categories are particularly significant from a welfare perspective because of the scale of dairy farming and the welfare harms of conventional production. Consumer adoption of precision fermentation dairy products is thus a high-leverage welfare action that does not require the consumer to compromise on taste or functionality.