The hardest thing about fake cheese is the part that melts.
Sandeep Patel runs a company whose entire reason to exist is one stubborn molecule: casein, the protein that lets real mozzarella stretch into ropes across a pizza slice. Strip the cow out and the stretch usually goes with it. Bettani Farms thinks it found the workaround in a seed.
Patel became chairman and CEO of Bettani Farms in October 2025, the same week the company shed the name Climax Foods and closed a $6.5 million Series A led by S2G Investments. He was not a parachute hire. He had been advising the business since 2021, which means he spent four years watching the cheese before he bet his career on it. When he finally took the chair, he already knew where the bodies and the better mozzarella were buried.
The company's bet rides on an ingredient called Caseed. It is a casein mimic pulled from regenerative field crops through a gentle, two-step trademarked process, free of dairy, soy and nuts. That last part matters more than it sounds. Most vegan cheese leans on coconut oil and starch and tastes like a compromise, or it leans on nuts and locks out anyone with an allergy. Caseed sidesteps both. A Bettani mozzarella runs on roughly five ingredients and delivers 12 to 20 grams of protein per 100 grams, with zero cholesterol.
A finance lifer who picked the messiest possible product.
Patel's resume reads like a tour of how money meets food. Managing director at Goldman Sachs and at Barclays, where he advised the food, agriculture and consumer companies that the rest of us only eat from. President and CFO at PopSockets, the phone-grip empire. CFO at Califia Farms, the oat-and-almond beverage brand whose cartons crowd every cold case in America. Then the pivot from counting the money to spending it, on cheese.
That history shows up in how he talks. He does not promise to save the planet by Tuesday. He talks about markets he can serve at scale, profitably, which in plant-based food is almost a heretical sentence. The category is littered with companies that built beautiful products nobody could afford to buy twice. Patel's instinct is the opposite: find the volume first, then earn the margin.
We're trying to do for pizza what oat milk has done for coffee.
That line is the whole strategy compressed into a sentence. Oat milk did not win by converting vegans. It won by becoming the default splash in a flat white, ordered by people who never thought about dairy politics for a second. Patel wants the same trick for cheese, and he is going where the volume actually is.
Forget the artisanal wheel. Go for the 40 percent.
Americans eat about 14 billion pounds of cheese a year. Mozzarella alone is roughly 40 percent of that, most of it shredded onto pizza in a freezer aisle or a foodservice kitchen. So Bettani aimed there instead of at the boutique cheese board. Mozzarella and feta are slated to launch in early 2026, first across San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami, then frozen-pizza brands and foodservice across North America, with Europe to follow.
The taste numbers give the plan some teeth. In tests, 39 percent of consumers either preferred Bettani's cheese to dairy or had no preference at all. That is not a rounding error in a category that holds barely over 1 percent of the U.S. cheese market. Patel reads that 1 percent as headroom, not as a ceiling.
Buy the distribution you cannot wait to build.
Here is the move that gives away the banker. Rather than pour the new money into a factory, Patel went shopping. Bettani acquired three plant-based companies in 2025: Numu, a Brooklyn mozzarella maker; Hungry Planet, a plant-based meat supplier; and Stockeld Dreamery, the Swedish-American cultured-cheese startup behind cream cheese and cheddar-style slices. The point was not the products. It was their relationships, including a path into Dot Foods, the largest foodservice redistributor in North America. In a business where the cold-start problem kills good products before anyone tastes them, he bought his way past the front door.
He also stacked the bench. SVP of R&D Rajiv Dave arrived from Califia Farms, Nestle and Great Lakes Cheese. SVP of Sales Tom Zilligen came by way of Numu, Pacific Foods and Schwann. Process engineer Maxwell Brown came from Meati and Ingredion. It is a roster built less for a science fair than for a loading dock.
We have zero cholesterol versus dairy cheese and we don't have the allergens.
Why the name had to change.
The old name, Climax Foods, was built to provoke. It got attention, then it got in the way. A retailer's frozen aisle and a foodservice buyer's spec sheet are not places that reward a wink. Bettani Farms is a softer, rounder word, the kind you can put on a package next to mozzarella without anyone smirking. The rename traveled with a refocus: pick the markets the company can actually serve at scale and profitably, and stop trying to be everything to every vegan. The science underneath stayed the same, including the AI-driven approach the company uses to design its formulations and pick which plant proteins behave most like the real thing.
Patel inherited a deep bench of cheeses on paper. Caseed can be built into mozzarella, feta, goat, cream cheese, brie and blue. The temptation, the one that has sunk plenty of food-tech companies, is to launch all of them at once and dilute the focus into a tasting flight nobody asked for. He went the other way. Mozzarella and feta first, the two that earn their keep in volume, with the rest waiting in the wings until the first products prove they can hold a shelf.
The cold start, and how to skip it.
Every new food brand hits the same wall. Buyers will not stock a product without proof of demand, and there is no demand without distribution. That chicken-and-egg deadlock is the cold-start problem, and it has killed better products than this one. Patel's answer was to buy his way out of it. The three acquisitions came with warm relationships already in place, including a route through Dot Foods, the largest foodservice redistributor in North America. Numu brought a working mozzarella business in Brooklyn. Hungry Planet brought plant-based meat and its foodservice ties. Stockeld Dreamery brought cultured cheese know-how and a European footprint. Stitched together, they hand Bettani a running start that money alone could not buy.
The geography of the rollout is deliberate too. Mozzarella and feta are aimed first at San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami, four cities dense with the kind of restaurants, pizzerias and adventurous eaters who try a new cheese without being asked twice. From there the plan widens to frozen-pizza brands and foodservice operators across North America, then Europe, where Stockeld's heritage gives Bettani a foothold and a name people already half-recognize.
None of this guarantees the cheese pull holds up at scale. Bettani is six years old, has raised about $33.5 million all in, and is now seeking another $3 to $5 million to reach cash-flow break-even and scale manufacturing later in 2026. Plant-based food has spent the last few years learning, painfully, that hype is not the same as repeat purchase. Patel's whole thesis is that discipline, not novelty, is what was missing.
What makes the story worth watching is the mismatch at its center. The product is squishy, emotional, sensory, the kind of thing chefs argue about. The person running it spent decades in spreadsheets and term sheets. Bettani is the experiment of pointing cold financial logic at the warmest food on the table and seeing whether the stretch survives contact with a P&L. If Patel is right, the next slice of pizza you pick up might never tell you what it left out.