The Scene Today
A slice of pizza, lifted slowly, with the pull you expected
Picture a wedge of pizza pulled from the box. The cheese stretches into long, glossy strands and refuses to snap. Nothing about it suggests a lab in Berkeley. Nothing about it suggests there was never a cow. That ordinary, unremarkable stretch is the whole point - and for years it was the one thing plant-based cheese could not do.
Bettani Farms builds the cheese behind that stretch. It is a 25-person food company in Berkeley, California, selling protein-rich, dairy-free cheese to the manufacturers and kitchens that actually feed people. Until October 2025 it answered to a different name, Climax Foods, and chased a different prize. The name changed. The obsession - making the melt - did not.
"Bettani is poised to do for pizza what oat milk has done for coffee."
- Sandeep Patel, CEO & Chairman
That is a bold sentence for a category most shoppers have learned to distrust. Plant-based cheese has spent a decade as the thing you tolerate, not the thing you reach for - rubbery, oily, allergen-loaded, and stubbornly resistant to heat. Bettani's bet is that the distrust was never about the idea. It was about the execution.
The Problem They Saw
Cheese is delicious, beloved, and quietly one of the dirtiest foods on the planet
Here is the inconvenient part. Cheese ranks as the third most carbon-intensive major food group and the single most water-intensive one. Global appetite for it keeps climbing. You can lecture people about that all day; they will still order the pizza. Demand does not negotiate.
The plant-based answers that arrived first solved the wrong problem. They removed the dairy and, in the process, removed the casein - the protein that lets mozzarella melt and stretch and lets cheddar taste like cheddar. Strip out casein and you are left with starch and oil doing a tired impression of the real thing. Add nuts or soy to compensate and you lock out everyone with an allergy. The category boxed itself in.
The market did not need another cheese substitute. It needed cheese that happened to be made differently.
- The gap Bettani set out to close
So the question Bettani kept circling was narrow and stubborn: could you rebuild casein's function - the melt, the stretch, the protein - without the cow, the nut, or the soybean? Most of the industry decided the answer was "close enough." Bettani decided "close enough" was the problem.
The Founders' Bet
An astrophysicist looked at cheese and saw a data problem
The company was founded in 2019 by Oliver Zahn, an astrophysicist who had spent his earlier career mapping galaxies. He turned that same appetite for large messy datasets onto food, using machine learning to reverse-engineer what makes cheese behave like cheese, then hunting the plant world for molecules that could play the same roles. It is an unusual resume for the dairy aisle, which is exactly why it produced an unusual answer.
That answer is Caseed - a plant protein, patented and naturally derived from the seeds of regenerative crops, engineered to mimic the functionality and mouthfeel of dairy casein. No dairy. No nuts. No soy. No fermentation tank. Just a protein, grown in a field, that happens to melt and stretch like the one cows make.
The casein never sees a cow or a fermentation tank. It starts as a seed.
- How Caseed works, in one sentence
The bet did not pay off on a straight line. The alternative-protein sector cooled hard, and the company restructured, reducing headcount by roughly half and securing bridge financing to stay alive. Zahn eventually stepped away from the team he started. What survived was the science - and a decision to stop chasing applause and start chasing markets it could actually serve at scale.
The Product
One protein, a full cheese board
Caseed is the engine; the cheeses are what it powers. Bettani's lineup reads like a deli case - mozzarella built for pizza, Greek-style feta, cheddar, Monterey jack, goat cheese, cream cheese, brie - each delivering 80% to 100% of dairy cheese's protein, landing around 12 to 20 grams per 100 grams. They are non-GMO and free of the usual allergen suspects.
Caseed protein
The patented plant casein, grown from regenerative crop seeds. Melt and stretch without dairy, nuts, or soy.
Mozzarella style
Built for the pizza box and the frozen aisle - the stretch test it has to pass every single time.
Feta & more
Greek-style feta, cheddar, jack, goat, cream cheese, and brie for foodservice and CPG partners.
Climax Blue
The award-shortlisted vegan blue from the early days - the proof of concept that started it all.
Bettani does not want to be a brand in your fridge. It wants to be the reason the brand in your fridge finally works.
- The business model, plainly
That last point matters. Bettani sells business-to-business: Caseed and finished cheeses go to frozen-food makers, foodservice operators, and existing plant-based brands. It is less interested in fighting for shelf space than in becoming the ingredient that makes everyone else's shelf space taste better. Less glamorous, far more scalable.
The Proof
Numbers, menus, and a French dairy giant
Skepticism is fair, so here is the evidence. The protein content is the headline the old category could never claim, and it is worth seeing next to its predecessors.
Protein per 100g: the gap Bettani closes
APPROXIMATE, FOR ILLUSTRATION · SOURCE: COMPANY-REPORTED FIGURES
Most legacy plant-based cheeses are starch and oil - protein barely registers. Caseed brings it back.
Then there is the company it keeps. Bettani's cheeses have appeared on the tasting menus at Eleven Madison Park and Atelier Crenn - kitchens not known for grading on a curve. And it has worked with the French dairy giant Bel Group on plant-based versions of Babybel, The Laughing Cow, and Boursin, which is roughly the equivalent of a vegan upstart getting invited into the cathedral.
$33.5M
Total raised to date
$6.5M
Series A initial close, Oct 2025
80-100%
Of dairy cheese's protein
3rd
Most carbon-intensive food group: cheese
The Series A - an initial $6.5 million led by S2G Investments, with At One Ventures, Gratitude Railroad, Manta Ray Ventures, and Toba Capital alongside - is not a moonshot war chest. It is a focused bet on commercialization, the unglamorous work of getting one protein into a lot of other people's products.
The Mission
Don't ask people to give up cheese. Give them a better one.
The team that will pull that off is no longer just scientists. Around the R&D core sit operators who have shipped food at scale: CEO Sandeep Patel, former CFO of Califia Farms; Rajiv Dave running R&D after stints at Califia, Nestle, and Great Lakes Cheese; Tom Zilligen leading sales out of NUMU and Pacific Foods; process engineer Maxwell Brown from Meati and Ingredion. It is a roster built to manufacture, not just to invent.
The mission was never to convert vegans. It was to make the environmental math disappear from the dinner decision entirely.
- Bettani's underlying wager
The logic is almost contrarian in its modesty. Bettani isn't trying to win an argument about diets. It is trying to make a cheese so functional that the question of where it came from stops mattering - the way nobody at a coffee shop debates the philosophy of oats. If the cheese performs, the sustainability is a free upgrade nobody has to think about.
Why It Matters Tomorrow
The seed that wants to be in every pizza box
Global cheese consumption is forecast to keep rising, and the planet keeps sending the invoice. A plant protein that delivers the melt, the stretch, and the protein - without the dairy, the allergens, or the carbon - is not a niche curiosity in that future. It is infrastructure. The frozen-pizza maker doesn't need a manifesto; it needs an ingredient that performs and pencils out. Bettani is building to be that supplier.
Plenty could go wrong. The category is littered with companies that promised the melt and delivered the rubber, and a focused Series A buys runway, not certainty. But the thing Bettani is selling is unusually testable. It either stretches or it doesn't. You can taste the answer.
Now picture that slice of pizza again. Same long, glossy pull. Same satisfying refusal to snap.
- Back where we started
Only this time you know the secret. There was never a cow. There was a seed, a Berkeley lab, an astrophysicist's hunch, and a stubborn refusal to settle for "close enough." The stretch is identical. Everything underneath it is different. That is the entire bet - and you can hold it in your hand.
