vegan-cheese
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Kite Hill made the almond earn its place on the cheese counter
A chef, a cheesemaker and a biochemist set out to give dairy-free cheese a little culture. Their almond-milk experiment became a grocery brand - and its latest test is winning breakfast with protein.
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.
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.