Under a new CEO and corporate name, Bettani Farms is seeking to capture a chunk of the North American alternative-cheese market with its “revolutionary” seed-based protein.
What started out as Climax Foods has bagged $6.5m of Series A financing, led by scale-up venture fund S2G Investments and is set to plant its mozzarella alternatives on pizzeria tables and into CPG brands next year.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Sandeep Patel, a former finance executive of Califia Farms, chats about the company’s aspirations with Just Food’s Simon Harvey.
Simon Harvey (SH): Why the rebrand?
Sandeep Patel (SP): It’s in conjunction with our pivot from a deep-tech start-up to commercialising food products. Since the founding of the company, the whole mission was to create food products that are truly better in every way and we thought this is a simpler way to communicate that.
We went with farms because there’s other companies trying to do things in the lab, whether that’s cell-cultured meat or casein developed through precision fermentation, genetically modifying microbes.
We are using naturally grown crops that are regenerative to the soil using gentle processes to extract the protein and transform it effectively into something that acts like casein.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataSH: Is the company effectively a dairy-free cheese manufacturer?
SP: Since the founding of the company, and really since 2022, we discovered a revolutionary plant protein, a way to extract it and do gentle processing so that it replicates some of the functionality of casein without creating the exact molecule, which creates the allergens of casein.
We’re not creating that allergen but we’re getting a lot of the functionality. Casein has many favourable properties. The most noticeable is it lets cheese stretch and melt but it’s also the texture, the springiness, the browning, how it transforms under heat.
Cheese is our number one focus. We are going to market with our protein for food manufacturers that have a use for it and we are also going to be working with our manufacturing partners to make finished cheese, which we will sell into foodservice, as well as to CPG brands. Frozen pizza makers, for instance, that either already have a plant-based pizza option but are dissatisfied with the current performance of the cheese. Or that have not launched dairy-free pizza options because the existing options in the marketplace aren’t satisfactory.
We’ve been speaking with many frozen-food manufacturers. They tell us our cheese performs way better than any plant-based cheese they’re using and it is approaching the performance of dairy.
It’s an indirect B2C strategy. Even though we’re not planning to launch our own products in retail in the first instance, we do want to try to create awareness indirectly, through call-outs on CPG products and then on menus.
SH: How is the company different to those trying to crack the stretch-and-melt code by producing cheeses or casein through precision fermentation?
SP: Bettani Farms is important because this is not produced in the lab. This is a natural regenerative crop. We can use different types of crops but we’re focusing on ones that are low water use, are grown widely around the world and are good for soil health.
We have a patented process to apply to the seeds of these crops to isolate and transform certain of those proteins found in the seeds in order to mimic the functionality of casein.
There have been advances in precision fermentation but the issues in the past have been scale, capital intensity and the cost. Then you’re also creating an allergen. You can’t call it dairy-free, which is why many of these [companies] call it animal-free.
Our view is creating the exact molecule is not really helpful in many cases because people are trying to create an allergen-free version of the cheese. Unless your cost can be lower than dairy, you’re going to run into some issues in a lot of places with that approach, in our view.
SH: So Bettani Farms is using plant seeds as the main protein ingredient?
SP: We’re not using soy, we’re not using nuts. In addition to the intense trend around consumers wanting more protein that’s turbo charged by GLP-1 drugs and other things, there’s also a parallel trend of trying to remove allergens. It’s not just gluten-free, it’s nut-free, it’s soy-free, all of these things, which we are able to do with our approach.
SH: What does the company’s Caseed trademark entail?
SP: Caseed is the name of the protein we have developed. It’s a two-step manufacturing trademark process. We make the protein and then we combine the protein with other things found in cheese – fats and starches and a few other ingredients. Our mozzarella cheese, for example, only has about five ingredients, so it’s very simple label.
SH: Can you explain how the company was founded and talk about the applications for the Series A funding?
SP: The company was founded by some data scientists in 2019 and the initial approach was to apply advanced data techniques and combine that with food science and culinary expertise to accelerate the pace of innovation in food with a view towards sustainability and animal welfare.
The decision was to focus on cheese because cheese is the third most carbon- intensive food product after beef and lamb. In the course of those approaches, we made a significant discovery a few years ago on this protein, and so we’ve decided to focus on commercialising that.
In the past, the company raised money through SAFE [Simple Agreement for Future Equity] notes from a range of investors. I was an advisor to the company since 2021 and in conjunction with the Series A the investors decided it was time for a new strategy and leadership, so I came in as CEO.
SH: What will the new funding be used for as I get the impression you haven’t commercially launched yet.
SP: We launched a blue cheese last year and we’ll likely bring that back at some point in the future but blue cheese is a small segment of the roughly $200bn global cheese market. In the US, which is $40bn, 40% is mozzarella, 35% is cheddar, and our protein really shines in these melty, stretchy applications.
We’re not going to abandon other cheeses – feta we’re going to launch as well because the protein also has this creaminess and emulsification and a very clean flavour profile.
We’re going to focus on large segments of the market where cheese making is also easy to scale. We paused production of what we had in blue cheese earlier this year so we can focus exclusively on the large segments of the market and scaling. And we’re planning the launch by early next year.
We’re trying to do for pizza what oat milk has done for coffee.
SH: Will some of the cash be used in factory investment?
SP: We’re not doing our own manufacturing. We are working with co- manufacturers both for the protein and the cheese. We may need some equipment that we need to put into the plant, so some of the funding will go towards that but it’s mostly to continue to lean into commercialisation, production trials, go-to-market resources, those types of things.
SH: What cheese are you looking to launch next year?
SP: The first products are going to be mozzarella and feta. We still have lots of people asking for the blue cheese because it’s such a remarkable product but that is not so easy to scale and serve the market in a mass-market way because the shelf life is trickier and the market size is a lot smaller.
SH: Is the key target audience people with allergens and various intolerances?
SP: Essentially, we’re trying to do for pizza what oat milk has done for coffee.
The first priority is people that are already choosing plant-based cheese or eating pizza without cheese, or not eating pizza at all. We have a far better product than any other plant-based cheese on the market. This is the feedback we’ve had from pizzerias and frozen-food makers. We think, just like oat milk, we can expand the size of the market significantly for plant-based cheese.
You have to compare cheese to cheese. Cheese has fat in it, it has milk fat, saturated fats. We will have saturated fat in our product too, about the same as dairy cheese, but what we don’t have is the cholesterol. We have zero cholesterol versus dairy cheese and we don’t have the allergens. And for consumers who care about, and companies that care about, the sustainability profile, we have a small fraction of the carbon footprint and water use.
SH: Taste and price have always been barriers in protein alternatives, so how will Bettani Farms’ cheese compete on price?
SP: Our goal is to be competitive with existing plant-based cheese options. Existing plant-based cheese options are usually sold at a premium to dairy. As we scale and achieve efficiencies, our goal is to get closer and closer to parity with dairy. This will vary in different markets around the world. And, in the US, dairy is heavily subsidised.
Take a market like China, pizza is one of the fastest-growing segments of foodservice and China has not been historically a cheese consumer. The largest market for plant milk is in China because of lactose intolerance and so forth, and because of our crop, which is grown on virtually every continent, there’s food security.
Right now, we’re focusing on the Western markets first and getting our product launched. Then we’ll expand through these concentric circles.
SH: Does that mean the US and Europe?
SP: We are in discussions with numerous North American and European players. We’ve also started up discussions with Asian players but it’ll very much be North America first and then Europe. Just in the US and Canada, we have massive opportunity.
SH: It is early days but are you able to talk about revenue and profit ambitions?
SP: I don’t want to talk specific numbers because I’d rather deliver the results and then talk about that. The potential customers we’re talking with need to be large chunks of revenue at once. When somebody’s reformulating their product they’re not going to do just a fraction of it they’re going to do the whole line.
SH: Where would you expect the company to be this time next year?
SP: We would hope to be in at least several frozen pizza brands. We would hope to have numerous pizzerias in key cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami, etc. Then we would have our feta cheese in several salad chains.
SH: The alternatives market is not without its challenges, including precision fermentation in cheese and dairy. How do you plan to succeed?
SP: I continue to believe that if you have the right product and the right application, you can drive change very quickly. I don’t think enough is being talked about the positives of that. We believe we have something that’s analogous to that for pizza, for other applications like pizza. We have real confidence that we’re able to launch this at scale.
