It looks like regular ice cream. It tastes like regular ice cream. But at $20 per pint, it’s definitely irregular ice cream.

Emeryville company Perfect Day released its first product on Thursday: an animal-free ice cream containing real dairy. The frozen concoction is the latest Bay Area food to replicate an animal product through technology, following in the footsteps of a veggie burger that bleeds, egg-free “mayo” and myriad others in the booming food tech marketplace.

Perfect Day, whose name is inspired by a Lou Reed song, creates dairy proteins through fermentation, which can then lead to cheese, yogurt and other dairy products without the environmental footprint of cows. It’s the first product of its kind on the market.

This process means Perfect Day can bring dairy to hot regions that normally can’t sustain cows — an option that could grow more important in the age of climate change.

“This is the new age of what you can do with food,” said co-founder Ryan Pandya.

Perfect Day has raised $61.5 million and is just one Bay Area company making strides in the food tech industry through fermentation. South San Francisco startup Clara Foods bioengineers yeast cells to create egg white protein, while Geltor in San Leandro makes gelatin in a lab; both plan to have products on the market in 2020.

The Perfect Day story begins like a lot of other plant-based food companies: Its founders, Pandya and Perumal Gandhi, went vegan and hated it. Specifically, they missed dairy and found the alternatives on the market severely lacking. With backgrounds in medicine, they teamed up in 2014 to see whether a common process in the medical field — fermentation — could help make a decent vegan cream cheese.

Some vegans might object to consuming Perfect Day’s dairy proteins since they are identical to a cow’s dairy proteins on a molecular level, but the company calls its products vegan because no animals are used in the creation process.

Essentially, Perfect Day gives microflora — a specific type of fungi — a blueprint through biotechnology that allows it to ferment sugar and create whey and casein. Pandya and Gandhi then mix the proteins with water and plant fat to make milk. From there, they can use the milk to make dairy products such as ice cream.

They notably skip lactose so the lactose-intolerant can consume Perfect Day’s products. Lactose normally adds sweetness and body, but plant sugar can be used instead. “We’ve chosen the parts of milk we really want,” Pandya said.

They began with ice cream to be as indulgent as possible. The Perfect Day culinary team experimented with flavors that riff on the country’s top three sellers — chocolate, strawberry and vanilla — and landed on milky chocolate, vanilla salted fudge and vanilla blackberry toffee. They’re selling combo packs of three pints each for $60 online at www.perfectdayfoods.com as an initial greeting to the world. With shipping and handling, the total cost should come to about $100. (Dry ice is expensive.)

After the initial 1,000 orders, Perfect Day will stop churning ice cream and start working with existing ice cream companies instead. Most producers, whether a giant like Haagen-Dazs or a craft creamery like Salt & Straw, already make vegan flavors with bases using almond milk, coconut cream or cashew milk. Alternatively, they could switch to Perfect Day’s base.

That’s how Perfect Day is approaching the future in general. The company plans to team up with cheese, yogurt and other companies that use dairy to bring its Perfect Day versions of popular products to grocery stores. The global food processing company Archer Daniels Midland is starting to make Perfect Day’s proteins to help them boost production, and Perfect Day intends to work with other such businesses in the same way.

Scaling up is the biggest challenge right now. Eventually, Gandhi said, they’ll be able to make their vegan ice cream cheaper than the conventional versions — potentially 40% less. For now, though, they’re pricier than even the most premium ice cream brands.

Looking beyond ice cream, the founders are excited to bring their proteins to regions with hot, dry climates that can’t sustain a dairy industry. Perfect Day is already in talks with governments and nonprofits, although Pandya said it’s too early to name them.

Looking even further ahead, Pandya and Gandhi said Perfect Day’s dairy could become essential with climate change, as more regions potentially become too warm for cows.

“If that climate spreads,” Pandya said, “we still need to make food.”

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker