The Spoon has been following Brave Robot’s animal-free ice cream journey since The Urgent Company launched the dessert brand last year. Since then, the company has introduced ice creams in a range of flavors, from hazelnut chocolate chunk to blueberry pie.
Last month, Brave Robot made its first foray out of the ice cream space to debut its Climate Hero Super Cake mix. The team is using the same cow-free whey protein ingredient that supplanted milk in its ice creams to replace the equivalent of three eggs in each box of the yellow cake mix. With this new offering, Brave Robot is demonstrating the ability of animal-free dairy proteins to mimic an expanding range of indulgent foods.
The Urgent Company was created by Perfect Day, an alternative protein manufacturer that produces real dairy proteins using precision fermentation. (You can check out The Spoon’s in-depth coverage of the company’s protein tech here.) The Urgent Company uses those precision fermented proteins to develop innovative food products, like the Brave Robot brand of desserts.
“The goal of Brave Robot is to raise awareness of the climate challenges we face today in a really fun way that makes it more tangible to make a difference,” Brave Robot’s President August Vega told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. The Urgent Company estimates that a pint of Brave Robot ice cream represents 34% less greenhouse gas emissions than a pint of traditional dairy ice cream.
In launching the Climate Hero Super Cake mix, the team wanted to bring that same sustainability innovation to a category that hasn’t changed much in recent years: “The cake aisle in the grocery store has been ripe for disruption,” Vega said. “There hasn’t been a lot of innovation, even in the premium space. And so it was just a natural next step.”
The company’s in-house research and design team spent about six months developing the recipe for the new cake mix. Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein plays a key role in the formula: The protein ingredient contributes foaming, water binding, and elasticity properties. It helps the cake to rise to the right height as it bakes, and to achieve the right texture.
The Spoon was sold on the texture of Brave Robot ice cream, and according to Vega, the Climate Hero Super Cake recreates conventional cake texture just as accurately. “The whey protein provides the fluffiness, moistness, and tenderness that you would normally get from animal products,” she said. “You’re really not missing animal products at all, which is pretty interesting when you’re looking at baked goods.”
In the new cake mix, the team wanted to create a versatile product that consumers could play with. “The more you can interact with your consumers and have them be creative with your product, the better,” Vega said. “There’s a variety of things that can be done with our cake mix: like over the weekend, I made an apple cake using our mix as the base.”
Brave Robot is promoting the product on Instagram as “a cake mix that makes more than just cake.” The team is also sharing recipes that use the cake mix as a shortcut to baking ambitious desserts—like whoopie pies with vegan vanilla frosting, and peanut butter-swirled brownies.
Along with cutting out the need for animal products, the Climate Hero Super Cake cuts down on single-use plastic packaging: The mix comes in a compostable pouch made from sustainably-sourced wood cellulose and other bio-based resins.
The team is currently focused on direct-to-consumer sales through the Brave Robot website. In the future, Vega said, the team will seek out other distribution channels (including partnerships with retailers) to make the product more widely available.
As for the future of Brave Robot, Vega said we can expect to see further indulgent innovations coming out soon. She couldn’t provide details on exact product categories—just the tantalizing hint that they could be “anything that you can have fun with and have a little moment of indulgence with, all while learning how to be more conscious of natural resources and our planet.”
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