Is vegan cheese any good, and does it melt?

The objection

“Vegan cheese is rubbery, tasteless, and it just won’t melt. It’s not a real substitute.”

The answer

Much of the vegan cheese people try when giving up cheese deserves the complaint, and in a 2023 blind tasting in New Zealand, all three vegan cheddars were liked less than dairy cheese. How well it melts varies far more, and depends heavily on which product you buy. Casein, the milk protein behind cheese’s melt and stretch, can now be brewed without a cow, but New Culture’s mozzarella, which uses it, was not yet made at commercial scale in mid-2026.

Why doesn’t most vegan cheese melt?

The commonest recipe is coconut oil and starch, and the starches used to set it form gels that don’t soften again when heated. A survey of 245 plant-based cheeses sold in the western US in 2021 and 2022 found 106 based on coconut oil with potato, tapioca or corn starch, and another 61 on cashews with coconut oil (Craig et al., 2022) [1]. In the UK, a survey of 109 products reported in a 2021 review found coconut oil was the main ingredient in 74% of them [2]. A 2025 review from Brazil found that most commercial alternatives melt far less than dairy cheese and linked this to those heat-stable starches [3]. Dairy cheese is built on casein, and a 2026 University of Southern Denmark review notes that without it plant cheese often turns out brittle or gummy [4]. The same recipe explains the nutrition: only 3% of the US products had 5 g of protein or more per serving and the median label showed no protein or calcium at all, though products made from cashews alone tended to have the most protein and the least salt and saturated fat [1].

Does any vegan cheese melt properly?

Some does, and the gap between brands is wide. In a 2025 North Carolina State University test, 117 people who had bought or eaten plant-based products in the past six months, or wanted to try vegan cheese, tried five widely sold US vegan mozzarella shreds melted on pizza. Judging the melt by eye, 89% said one had melted about right, while 98% said another hadn’t melted enough [5]. Five cheddar-style shreds melted in a quesadilla split the same way, from 85% saying one melted about right to 94% saying another hadn’t melted enough [5]. Stretch was the weak point, and for none of the mozzarellas did more than half say it stretched about right [5]. The best-liked melted shreds averaged 6.3 to 6.4 on a scale running from 1 (dislike extremely) to 9 (like extremely), and none of the ten did well both cold and melted [5]. Some studies also suggest zein, a maize protein, could help plant cheeses melt more the way casein does [3].

Does vegan cheese taste as good as dairy?

Not yet, on the evidence of a 2023 blind tasting in New Zealand, in which 157 people liked three vegan cheddar-style cheeses less than five dairy ones, almost without exception (Jaeger et al., 2025) [6]. The tasters weren’t told which was which, and they also described the vegan cheeses less favourably [6]. The North Carolina test included no dairy cheese, but there too flavour and texture were the two main complaints, and artificial or off flavours counted against the products cold and melted alike [5]. The Danish review found methodological problems, such as small samples, in 51 of the 85 sensory studies it examined, so the evidence is thinner than its volume suggests [4].

Can cheese be made with casein but no cow?

It can, but the start-ups brewing casein, such as New Culture and Standing Ovation, were still scaling up in 2026, and the FDA had yet to send a ‘no questions’ letter for any brewed casein. Precision fermentation gives a microbe the gene for one animal protein and collects the protein it makes; US regulators affirmed chymosin, the active enzyme in rennet, as safe for cheese-making in 1990 when made this way by E. coli carrying the prochymosin gene [7]. New Culture self-affirmed its brewed casein as generally recognised as safe in the US in 2024, a route that needs no FDA review [8]. By October 2026 two casein notices were pending with the FDA, one from Formo Foods and NewMilkBuzz for alpha-s1 casein made by E. coli and one from Australia’s Eden Brew for a beta-casein preparation, and the FDA had stopped evaluating a third, for beta-casein made by E. coli, at the notifier’s request in 2025 [9]. New Culture said in 2023 that it would launch its mozzarella in early 2024 [10]; in July 2026 it said the cheese was not yet produced at commercial scale and cost more than conventional mozzarella [11]. Standing Ovation, a French start-up that had planned a US launch in 2025 [12], said in March 2026 that it hoped for an FDA ‘no questions’ letter by the end of the year [13]. Making the protein is also only part of the job, since the caseins in milk are assembled into structures called micelles; a 2022 review judged rebuilding them technically feasible but said whether it can be done cheaply remains to be seen [14].