food-production
(13)
Vita Coco
How two guys and a bar-room question about homesickness became a public company that pours roughly half of America's coconut water - and files its social mission in the same drawer as its earnings.
Bel Group
How a Jura cheesemaker became a 120-country snacking machine - and why a 160-year-old family business is now spending it on regenerative farms and lab-made dairy.
Smithfield Foods
Smithfield Foods is betting that the future of pork belongs to the company that can control the animal, the factory, the brand and the refrigerated truck - then make all four work as one.
Growthwell Foods
Growthwell Foods is a Singapore-based plant-based protein company building meat and seafood alternatives tailored for Asian palates. Re-founded in 2019 by brothers Justin and Colin Chou on top of their father's 1989 vegetarian food business, it manufactures brands like HAPPIEE! and owns a majority stake in Israeli ingredient maker ChickP, which produces a chickpea protein isolate above 90% purity. Backed by a $22M Series A led by Creadev with Temasek and GGV Capital, the company operates a fully automated R&D and production facility at Senoko and aims to feed a growing region hungry for sustainable, culturally familiar protein.
Gotham Greens
Gotham Greens is a Brooklyn-born indoor farming and fresh food company that grows pesticide-free leafy greens and herbs year-round in a national network of high-tech hydroponic greenhouses. Founded in 2009, it opened the first commercial rooftop greenhouse in the United States and has since scaled to more than a dozen facilities across nine states, producing roughly 100 million heads of lettuce a year using up to 90% less water and 97% less land than conventional field farming. Beyond greens, the company sells branded salad kits, dressings, dips and cooking sauces to more than 6,500 retail, restaurant and foodservice locations nationwide.
Hyphen
Hyphen builds the Makeline, an automated meal-assembly system that sits beneath a restaurant's counter and portions and plates digital and takeout orders while staff handle the guest-facing line above it. Paired with its CulinaryOS software for menus, orders, inventory and labor, the San Jose company aims to raise peak-hour throughput and order accuracy without replacing kitchen workers. Founded in 2020 by Stephen Klein and Daniel Fukuba, Hyphen has raised roughly $59M and counts Chipotle and Cava among its strategic investors and pilot customers.
Butterball
Butterball is the largest producer of turkey products in the United States, selling more than 1 billion pounds of turkey a year from its headquarters in Garner, North Carolina. Jointly owned by Seaboard Corporation and Maxwell Farms, the company makes whole turkeys, turkey cuts, ground turkey, turkey bacon, sausage and deli meats for grocery, foodservice and export - and runs the Turkey Talk-Line, the Thanksgiving cooking hotline that has answered questions from anxious cooks every holiday season since 1981.
Steric
Steric is a Culver City, California technology company that uses low-energy electromagnetic fields to adjust wine and spirits at a molecular level in seconds - improving flavor, aroma and mouthfeel without adding, filtering or aging. Its patent-pending, software-driven systems let distillers and winemakers rescue flawed batches, lock in batch-to-batch consistency, and polish premium products while preserving ABV and color. The company won the 2023 DISCUS Innovation Showcase and closed a $3.5M seed round in October 2025.
Sundia Corporation
Sundia Corporation is an Orinda, California-based plant-based snacking company best known for its True Fruit ready-to-eat refrigerated fruit cups and True Chia coconut-milk chia pots. Founded in 2004 around the unsexy genius of better watermelons, Sundia has spent two decades turning produce-aisle staples into branded, shelf-stable convenience without the syrupy compromises of the canned-fruit era.
Cirkul
Cirkul is a Tampa-based personalized hydration company that makes a reusable water bottle paired with snap-in flavor cartridges and a 'Flavor Dial' that lets drinkers control how much taste, vitamins, electrolytes or caffeine flow into plain water - with zero sugar and zero calories. Founded by former Dartmouth football teammates Garrett Waggoner and Andy Gay, the brand went viral on TikTok, became one of Walmart's fastest-selling home products, and reached a $1 billion valuation.
Bettani Farms
Bettani Farms is a Berkeley, California food company making protein-rich, dairy-free cheese that melts and stretches like the real thing. Its patented Caseed protein, derived from the seeds of regenerative crops, mimics dairy casein without the dairy, nuts, soy, or carbon footprint. Formerly Climax Foods, the company rebranded to Bettani Farms in October 2025, named former Califia Farms CFO Sandeep Patel as CEO, and closed an initial $6.5M of its Series A led by S2G Investments to scale mass-market cheeses like mozzarella and feta.
Amy's Kitchen
Amy's Kitchen is a family-owned, privately held organic food maker based in Petaluma, California. Founded in 1987 by Andy and Rachel Berliner and named after their daughter, the company makes 250-plus vegetarian frozen and convenience meals - soups, burritos, pizzas, bowls and mac and cheese - all built from organic, non-GMO ingredients. A Certified B Corporation, Amy's has grown from a kitchen-table pot pie into a roughly billion-dollar retail brand without ever going public.
Basic American Foods
Basic American Foods is a family-owned food production company founded in 1933 and headquartered in Walnut Creek, California. It is the world's largest producer of dehydrated potato products, best known for Potato Pearls premium mashed potatoes, Golden Grill hash browns, and Santiago refried beans. The company serves foodservice operators, retail consumer brands, and food manufacturers through its ingredients business, sourcing potatoes from prime growing regions in Idaho and Washington.