protein
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Sekilo
Sekilo is a Jakarta-based B2B company building an AI-powered halal protein supply chain for Indonesia's foodservice industry, starting with poultry. Formerly the quick-commerce grocery startup Dropezy (YC W22), it pivoted in 2023 to process and distribute chicken to caterers, restaurant chains, industrial buyers, and processed-meat factories. Sekilo unifies procurement, processing, cold chain, and delivery into a single asset-light operating layer, handling custom orders from 25kg for small caterers up to 10-20 tons for large buyers.
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.
Tezza Foods
Tezza Foods makes the first dairy-free yogurt that goes spoon-for-spoon with Greek yogurt. By culturing and straining organic American-grown soymilk, the Oakland-based company turns whole soybeans into a thick, high-protein yogurt with the protein and probiotics of dairy Greek yogurt - plus fiber and omega-3s - using about 90% less land, water and emissions than dairy. Founded in 2019 by MIT-trained microbiome scientist Nathaniel Chu and Josh Moser, Tezza is a public benefit corporation built on the idea that the world's most nutritious and sustainable protein should be the one we all eat.
Nathaniel Chu
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
Arturo Elizondo
Arturo Elizondo is the co-founder and CEO of The EVERY Company (formerly Clara Foods), the precision fermentation biotech pioneering animal-free egg proteins used by food brands worldwide. Born in Laredo, Texas, educated at Harvard, and seasoned by stints at the White House, USDA, and Credit Suisse, he co-founded the company in 2014 after meeting a cell biologist at a food-tech conference. Under his leadership, EVERY has raised over $471M, launched the world's first animal-free egg protein into Walmart, attracted actress Anne Hathaway as an investor, and earned Elizondo the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award. His mission: end factory farming by making fermentation-derived proteins cheaper, cleaner, and better than the real thing.