califia-farms
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Greg Steltenpohl’s second act came in a milk bottle
He started selling juice to keep a jazz band going. Thirty years later, Greg Steltenpohl built Califia Farms by giving another business room to change its tune.
Dave Ritterbush and the Fine Art of Inheriting the Future
He learned brand-building in the ice-cream aisle, helped take a protein company to a $1 billion sale, and now runs Califia Farms with a deceptively simple rule: inherit the past, then build for what comes next.
Sandeep Patel
Sandeep Patel is the chairman and CEO of Bettani Farms, the Berkeley plant-based cheese company that rebranded from Climax Foods in October 2025 alongside a $6.5 million Series A round led by S2G Investments. A former CFO at Califia Farms, president and CFO at PopSockets, and managing director at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, Patel was a Bettani advisor since 2021 before taking the top job. He is betting the company's proprietary Caseed ingredient - a casein-mimicking protein pulled from regenerative seed crops, free of dairy, soy and nuts - can finally give vegan mozzarella the stretch and melt that pizza demands. His pitch: do for pizza what oat milk did for coffee.