Vegan cheese convinces no one. It doesn’t stretch, it hardly melts, and if you leave it out too long, it separates into an oily mess. Typically made from a blend of nuts, fats, gums and binders, it’s also usually unhealthy.
But things may be looking up. Oliver Zahn, an astrophysicist turned data scientist and founder of Berkeley company Climax Foods, has discovered new combinations of plant proteins and fats that can do all the things vegan cheese historically couldn’t — including fool chefs.
“Many will be hard-pressed to tell it’s not a dairy-based cheese,” said chef Eric Tucker at longstanding vegan restaurant Millennium in Oakland. He serves Climax’s visually striking blue cheese in a classic endive salad with caramelized pear, walnuts and hoja santa oil, praising its “real creamy texture and a proper blue cheese funk.”
The secret sauce, or protein, in most cheese is casein. In fact, cow’s milk is 80% casein. It’s what enables everything from milk to yogurt and cheese. With the addition of salt, microbes and a scant few other helpers, casein protein is what turns milk into cheese curds or coagulates it into hard or soft cheese.
What Zahn and his team of scientists at Climax have unveiled is a plant-based casein that mimics the animal version in functionality. Theirs is the first cheese showcasing a functional animal-free casein on the market, made from ingredients like pumpkin seeds, coconut oil, lima beans, hemp protein, coconut cream and kokum butter.
Zahn has a serious resume. Born and raised in Germany, he did his doctoral work at Harvard and led UC Berkeley’s Center for Cosmological Physics alongside two Nobel Prize winners. Later he worked for Impossible Foods, where he oversaw data science and helped improve the flavor and texture of its second generation of plant-based meats, then Google and SpaceX, where he helped prepare the Falcon9 rocket for the first human launch.
Zahn is vegan, but he started Climax Foods in 2020 to make climate strides. “Environmentally, cheese is almost as bad as beef in terms of carbon footprint per kilogram,” he said. “You need to use so much milk to make so little cheese.”
Climax is hardly alone in the burgeoning plant-based dairy sector. According to the Plant Based Foods Association, plant-based cheese sales were $230 million in 2022 (a slight decline from 2021). The entire plant-based food category is valued at $8 billion and growing; traditional cheese is more like $30 billion.
But Climax is taking a different approach than its competitors, including Perfect Day, New Culture and Change Foods. These three Bay Area food-tech startups are also making animal-free casein, but they do so by re-creating animal casein protein molecularly using a costly method called precision fermentation.
Zahn thinks Climax is on a faster, cheaper path: locating a functionally similar protein in plants.
“You can make the huge assumption that you need a protein that looks just like casein,” Zahn said on a recent tour of his Berkeley lab, “but there are other proteins that have another molecular appearance that behave the same.”
To find these proteins, Climax has been using artificial intelligence, or machine learning. All AI starts with collecting data. ChatGPT, for instance, scrapes large swaths of text. But in this case, that data didn’t exist. Climax needed reams of nutritional, functional and flavor information from plants to instruct the computer models they would eventually build to scan for combinations of usable proteins that achieve melty, stretchy and delicious results.
It took about 18 months of work in Climax’s lab to collect and screen data on taste, flavor and other parameters humans crave (or don’t) from cheese. In addition to humans endlessly sniffing and analyzing, the team used a texture analyzer, a rheometer (to measure viscosity) and a gas spectrometer (to separate and analyze chemical mixtures). “That had never been done before,” Zahn said. The upside is that the startup can do things like increase the protein-to-fat ratio, which should make cardiologists happy.
When they found some promising options, Climax hired a cheesemaker, Sacha Laurin, who previously worked in traditional cheese and served as an instructor at the San Francisco Cheese School. Blue cheese was the first product the team nailed, despite its additional requirements.
“Blue cheese is so complex and messy,” Zahn said. Climax’s plant-based milk needed to provide the exact balance of microbes, nutrients and oxygen that allows the cheese’s mold, Penicillium roqueforti, to grow.
The brand makes its blue cheese — with other styles to come — at its cheese-making facility in Petaluma. It sells directly to restaurants, including the influential Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Peter Fikaris, co-owner and chef of the Butcher’s Son in Berkeley, a vegan deli, was completely surprised by the flavor. “I was like, ‘Wow! Somebody actually did it,’ ” he said. And unlike most other plant-based blue cheese substitutes, it’s made the way animal products are made, with the same microbes. Fikaris is serving it on his Buffalo bacon ranch fried chicken sandwich (all vegan, of course).
Blossom & Root, a restaurant in Danville, serves Climax blue cheese in a mushroom “steak” salad featuring grilled maitake mushrooms, little gems, radicchio, watermelon radish, fennel, mission figs, toasted sunflower seeds, fried onions and blue cheese dressing — all topped with a sliver of the cheese.
In addition to chefs, Climax partnered with Bel Group, the French cheese maker that makes Babybel and Boursin cheeses, to improve the nutrition levels of its existing plant-based products. Climax “can screen the plant-based area to help us find the combination between the right ingredients that are as good as what we have done but better,” said Anne Pitkowski, research and applications director at Bel.
Zahn has big dreams for Climax. Once the startup can scale to nationwide distribution, he hopes to sell a cheese that is 30% cheaper for consumers. This will rely on making a protein ingredient that is three to five times cheaper than commodity cow’s milk.
“The sweet spot may be between giving you everything you like about animal products, but (adding) something novel and maybe superior,” he said.
For now, he’s fine just blowing people’s minds: “It’s like the funnest part of the job.”
Reported for the SF Chronicle on September 14, 2023.