Kathryn
Cook.

She is making the oldest bean do something new

A chickpea has not meaningfully changed in roughly ten thousand years. Kathryn Cook decided that was a problem worth a company. As CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, she is breeding chickpeas that carry up to 75% more protein than the ones in your hummus - and doing it the slow, unglamorous way: with wild ancestors, machine learning, and a lot of field acreage across five US states.

The pitch is deceptively plain. Take a crop the world already grows, already eats, and already trusts. Then quietly rebuild its genetics so it delivers more protein, drinks less water, and leaves the soil better than it found it. No gene editing, no lab-grown anything. Just the genetic raw material that domestication threw away, painstakingly bred back in.

What makes the story land is where Cook came from. She is not a lifelong agronomist. She was an engineer at Boeing and a technical program manager at Facebook, working on high-altitude aircraft and speech recognition, when she walked away to bet on a legume. The throughline is not the industry. It is the instinct to look at any object - a fuselage, a voice model, a bean - and ask what it is actually made of.

The defection from big tech

Cook started where ambitious engineers start: at the edge of hard problems. At Boeing she developed raw materials and production methods for aerospace. At Facebook she ran technical programs - first on high-altitude aircraft, then inside the voice technology group, working alongside machine learning teams on speech recognition and natural language processing. By any conventional scorecard, she was winning.

The scorecard stopped mattering. She has described feeling disconnected from the physical world, short on the sense that her work touched anything she could hold. She wanted her job to line up with what she cared about - sustainability, climate resilience, food that more people could afford. Speech models, for all their cleverness, were not going to feed anyone.

A dinner conversation that became a company

The pivot had a kitchen table at the center of it. Cook's father, Doug Cook, is a UC Davis professor who has spent more than three decades studying legume genetics - nitrogen fixation, evolutionary diversity, the deep ancestry of the chickpea. As Kathryn weighed leaving tech, he mentioned, almost in passing, that his lab had figured out how to dramatically raise the protein content of the chickpea.

Most people nod at that and pass the salt. The Cooks talked about it for six months. The conclusion: research this good should not stay buried in journals. In 2019, Kathryn, Doug, and former postdoctoral researcher Brendan Riely founded NuCicer to turn three decades of academic work into something a food company could actually buy.

The science, in plain terms

Modern domesticated chickpeas are inbred and narrow - generations of farmers selecting for the same handful of traits stripped out most of the crop's genetic range. NuCicer's edge is what is still out there in the wild. The Cicer genus holds 40-plus species that split from the domesticated chickpea anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred thousand years ago, yet remain genetically compatible enough to cross.

By breeding domesticated chickpeas with those wild relatives, NuCicer expanded the crop's usable genetic diversity by roughly 40 times. The first-generation result lands around 35% protein, up from the commodity baseline near 20%. It carries less oil - 4.5 to 5% versus 6 to 7% - and tastes, by their account, more nutty than aggressively beanie. Yields stay competitive. The company layers machine learning and data analytics on top of the breeding program to find the right crosses faster.

The commercial promise is the part that makes food companies lean in: cut the cost of chickpea protein by roughly half, and you have a plant protein that can credibly challenge pea protein in alt-meat and beyond - without asking anyone to give up flavor.

Why the chickpea, of all things

The plant-protein industry spent a decade chasing pea and soy. Cook went the other direction, toward a crop with a built-in advantage most ingredient companies overlooked: people already love it. Hummus, falafel, roasted snacks, flour - the chickpea arrives without the suspicion that greets a novel ingredient. It also fixes nitrogen in the soil, needs comparatively little water, and slots neatly into crop rotations as the kind of regenerative option growers can actually farm at scale.

NuCicer's bet is that the path to better food is not a stranger on the shelf but a familiar face with a quietly upgraded resume. The same bean, the same recipes, the same trust - now carrying enough protein to matter nutritionally and priced to compete with the proteins food companies already buy. It is a less glamorous thesis than lab-grown meat, and possibly a more durable one.

The supply chain is being built to match. NuCicer's team of roughly two dozen - molecular biologists, plant breeders, sensory scientists - works the problem from genome to flavor panel, while the company contracts growers to plant its varieties across multiple states. Revenue comes from supplying those high-protein chickpeas to food companies as an ingredient, with the first consumer products carrying NuCicer's beans reaching shelves in early 2025 across categories like breakfast, pasta, and noodles.

What she is really building

Strip away the genetics and the funding rounds and Cook's project is an argument about tradeoffs - specifically, that the ones we accept in food are mostly artificial. Healthy is supposed to cost more. Affordable is supposed to taste worse. Sustainable is supposed to require sacrifice. She rejects the whole framing. The chickpea is just the vehicle for proving that flavor, nutrition, affordability, and grower profit can ride together in one crop instead of trading off against each other.

That ambition is grounded by an engineer's patience. Breeding is measured in seasons, not sprints. There is no overnight version of recovering a hundred thousand years of lost genetic diversity. Cook seems to like it that way - a problem big enough to be worth a career, concrete enough to hold in your hand, and slow enough that doing it right actually counts.

Running a company with your dad

Cook grew up wandering through her father's UC Davis lab. She also spent years making sure she would never work there. Founding a company with a parent is the kind of thing advisors gently warn against - too much rope, too few boundaries, a relationship with no off switch.

Her fix was a single rule, stated plainly and held to: at work he is Doug, at home he is dad. Two relationships, two contexts, one person - and a hard line drawn between them so the company could not quietly eat the family. It is a small piece of operational discipline that says a lot about how she runs things.

The same pragmatism shows up in how she funds the business. Cook favors building toward positive unit economics from the start over riding an endless carousel of fundraising rounds. The goal is a stable business, not a permanent pitch deck - a notably unfashionable stance in a sector built on the next raise.