Emily McIsaac, Co-Founder and COO of Daisy Lab

Emily McIsaac is a New Zealand scientist and entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief operating officer of Daisy Lab, the Auckland company making dairy proteins without cows.

McIsaac’s path into the company is the most unusual of the three. She originally trained at Massey University while learning to fly, dreaming of becoming a pilot, before her fascination with genetics won out and she switched to a Master of Science. When Miller and Freed wanted to prove Daisy Lab’s concept cheaply, they sponsored a master’s research project and McIsaac was the student who took it on, joining in 2021 as the third co-founder. Her research became the company’s early technical proof.

From that research seat she moved into operations and as COO has worked at the translation layer where deep-tech companies are actually made or broken: turning proof-of-concept science into process, managing the operational complexity of scaling biotechnology and helping take the company from a flask to ten-litre fermenters and toward a planned pilot plant. She has also become one of Daisy Lab’s most effective public explainers, walking media and the public through how dairy-identical proteins can be made without a single cow.

That combination of research and communication has been recognised. McIsaac won the 2024 AIMES Supreme Award and Innovation Award and the Sprout Agritech advance Innovator Award at the KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards, for her work creating animal-free dairy proteins. In 2025 she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in the Industry, Manufacturing & Energy category, recognition of her as an individual innovator, not just a member of a founding trio.

McIsaac’s profile is noteworthy because she represents a new generation of New Zealand biotech founders working across science, operations and communication at once. Her story, from aspiring pilot to award-winning food-tech founder before the age of thirty, is a reminder that turning research into a real company takes more than a good idea; it takes people who can carry it across the gap into the world. Her co-founders Irina Miller and Dr Nikki Freed bring the business vision and scientific depth that make the company work. The wider company story sits in the Daisy Lab anchor story, with the technology explained in What is precision fermentation?.

Sources: Massey University · The Channel Magazine · RNZ Country Life