Adam Behrens and the business of buying food more time

In the back of a warehouse, Adam Behrens and Sezin Yigit were dipping pineapples into a coating. It was 2018, when The Engine made its first financial commitment to their company, then called Cambridge Crops. For a business descended from university laboratories, the scene had a pleasing lack of ceremony. There was fruit. There was a treatment. Eventually, there would be a verdict delivered by the fruit.

Behrens had trained as a chemical engineer, earned a doctorate in bioengineering, and worked as a postdoctoral associate in Robert Langer’s lab at MIT. Now he was helping build a company around a proposition that sounded better suited to a department store window: food could wear silk. The point was to buy it time.

That warehouse episode is a useful place to meet him. The scientific credentials explain how he arrived. The pineapples explain what he was prepared to do once he got there. A material with interesting properties still needed to survive the awkward journey into somebody else’s working day.

An expensive education in inexpensive things

Behrens graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 2010 and a PhD in bioengineering in 2015. His doctoral work was in Peter Kofinas’s lab. Five years between degrees gave him a sustained apprenticeship in how materials behave, and how their behaviour might be put to work.

His own description of that period is unusually attentive to price. “I fell in love with developing solutions out of seemingly unsophisticated materials.” It is a revealing preference for someone whose subsequent company would use a substance associated with expensive clothes. Silk had acquired a luxury reputation; Behrens was interested in an economical job it might perform.

Cost sensitivity has consequences for an inventor. An elegant result must eventually make sense at the quantity and price a customer needs. Food makes that question particularly unforgiving. A strawberry has little patience for a costly intervention, and its seller has a margin to protect. Behrens’s interest in ordinary inputs fitted a business in which the treatment would have to earn its place.

“I fell in love with developing solutions out of seemingly unsophisticated materials.”

Adam Behrens

At MIT, he joined Langer’s lab, a setting where research and entrepreneurship have long been close neighbours. Behrens’s later career would require both vocabularies: the precision to describe a material, and the clarity to tell someone why they should buy it. Neither qualification makes the other automatic. A laboratory result does not arrive with a purchase order attached.

The strawberry belonged to somebody else

The discovery behind Mori began with Benedetto Marelli, then a postdoctoral researcher in Fiorenzo Omenetto’s lab at Tufts. A laboratory cooking competition required silk in the dishes. Marelli coated strawberries, left them on the bench, and returned to find that the treated fruit had kept while the untreated fruit had spoiled. Dessert had become an experiment almost despite itself.

Behrens entered through the network around Marelli, Omenetto, and fellow co-founder Livio Valenti. The distinction matters. His story is about helping turn a discovery into a business, alongside the people who made it and those who could develop it further. Yigit brought her own expertise in silk. The company assembled around a shared material and a practical problem.

In 2017, Cambridge Crops won first place in the Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize. The competition offered access to industry feedback as well as recognition. Behrens valued the chance to test the technology and work out what customers might find valuable. A prize could open a door; the conversations beyond it could change what the company tried to sell.

A luxury material takes a shift in produce

Mori extracts silk protein from cocoons using water, salt, and heat. The protein can form an edible protective layer on food. Its purpose is to slow deterioration, including the loss of water and the effects of oxygen. The material’s original assignment was protection inside a cocoon. Mori gives it a different object to protect.

For Behrens, this creates a delicate sales problem: the customer is being asked to value something the eater should barely notice. A coating that changes the experience of a familiar food could create an entirely new objection. In one demonstration he has recounted, a lettuce-company chief executive sampled treated lettuce and could not detect the coating. The absence of an impression was the desired impression.

The company’s current description extends well beyond a fruit bowl. Its website lists work on more than 50 types of food, with applications through washing, dipping, spraying, glazing, and formulation. Those are different ways into an existing production process. They also help explain why Behrens’s work involves conversations with operators who already have equipment, routines, and products to move.

In 2020, Cambridge Crops became Mori, taking its name from Bombyx mori, the silk moth. The shorter name also accompanied a broader description of what the company could do. A business named for crops had developed ambitions across fresh and processed foods. The moth supplied both the material and a more accommodating name.

The slower clock in the room

Food deteriorates on one schedule. Business partnerships advance on another. Behrens has been unusually specific about the distance between them. In a discussion of corporate collaboration, he described agreements taking from roughly three months to about 18 months. For a young company planning its staffing and spending, that range is a management problem before it becomes a scientific one.

His preferred response starts with defining the problem and agreeing on a technical milestone. A pilot needs criteria that both sides understand before the work begins. Otherwise, the people supplying the treatment and the people testing it can finish the same experiment with different ideas of whether it worked. Even an apparently simple word such as success requires a little engineering.

He also favours having an internal business champion help move agreements through legal review. Delays are easier to manage when their likely length is clear. That concern gives a less glamorous view of a materials entrepreneur’s life: time spent allocating people, negotiating commitments, and explaining schedules to backers. The strawberries may be patient now. The payroll remains punctual.

Buying the capacity to make it

Cambridge Crops raised a $4 million seed round in 2019. The following year, as Mori, it announced a $12 million Series A led by Acre Venture Partners. A $16 million Series B led by the Drawdown Fund followed in April 2021. The business was gathering resources for the work between a repeatable experiment and a repeatable supply of product.

That 2021 announcement set out plans to accelerate commercialization across categories and geographies, expand development, and bring manufacturing streams online. For Behrens, the ambition carried several obligations at once. Customers would need material to test and eventually use. The team would need to produce it. New applications would need their own development work.

By March 2022, Mori announced a further $50 million in Series B1 financing. It had recently opened a silk-protein manufacturing facility and moved to new Boston headquarters. The announcement described initial commercial partnerships and plans for additional categories and markets. It was a picture of a company taking on the expensive physical requirements of its idea.

Behrens connected the work to shipping delays and labour shortages that businesses had been experiencing. Extra usable time could give a customer more room to plan and move food. The appeal was practical: keeping more of what had already been produced available for sale. A new ingredient would have to prove its usefulness in that ordinary commercial arithmetic.

The inventor stays in the business

Behrens continued to put his name on technical work. In September 2023, he and Marelli co-authored an article on commercializing silk protein for food preservation. Its scope included manufacturing, scale-up, field validation, and the challenges ahead. The discovery and the business still belonged in the same conversation.

A US patent granted on March 11, 2025, lists Behrens among the inventors of systems and methods for manufacturing silk-fibroin solutions and powders. Its description includes reactor vessels, filtration, holding tanks, and processing equipment. These are the nouns that make the early warehouse scene feel like a beginning. Producing the material consistently requires an apparatus of its own.

The inventor list also makes the collective nature of the undertaking visible. Amanda Baryshyan and other colleagues appear alongside him. The technical work of a company accumulates through teams; a chief executive’s biography can obscure that if every development is folded into a solitary founder story. Behrens’s later advice gives the people around the process their due.

What he tells the next founder

At Harvard’s Lab-to-Launch Lounge in November 2024, his advice concerned hiring, teams, and culture. “Don’t discount the people side of team building, hiring, and building company culture.” Coming from an engineer who had spent years getting a material into production, it is a useful choice of emphasis.

His relationship with Maryland has continued too. He returned as a speaker in 2022 to discuss applying an engineering education to running a business, and the chemical and biomolecular engineering department lists him on its external advisory board. In 2026, the Clark School included him in its Early Career Distinguished Alumni Society class. The route out of the laboratory has brought him back to students preparing to leave one.

There is something quietly amusing about the scale of the undertaking. A material famous for making an entrance is being employed to disappear into the background. Behrens’s task is to assemble the science, people, equipment, and agreements that let it do so. After the demonstrations and the financing, the test remains wonderfully plain: does more of the food make it to someone’s plate?