In California, plant-based food start-up Climax Foods has raised $7.5 million. The company’s initial focus will be on developing a fermentation-based process to make cheese, although the company aims to develop a platform that can be used to produce any animal based food, including meat and milk.
“We want to essentially replace cows and other animals as inefficient factories for converting plants into meat and dairy,” CEO Oliver Zahn tells FoodNavigator-USA.com. “If you use something like fermentation, you can convert a set of chemicals and proteins to another set, and some will have flavor activity, some will contribute to the texture of the food, so there are an infinite number of ways to convert those many thousands of ingredients to foods that have better textures, flavors, nutritional density and price points.”
Investors included At One Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures, and S2G Ventures.