Maury Leyland Penno, Co-Founder of Leaft Foods

Maury Leyland Penno is a New Zealand agribusiness executive and co-founder of Leaft Foods, the Canterbury company turning ordinary leaves into high-functioning protein.

Leyland Penno came to Leaft from the heart of New Zealand’s dairy establishment. She spent more than a decade at Fonterra in senior commercial and strategy roles, working across the co-operative’s ingredients and consumer businesses. That career gave her a detailed understanding of how New Zealand earns from protein and where the constraints are. Dairy is a major export industry, but it is also land-intensive, water-intensive and increasingly exposed to climate and market pressure. Leyland Penno began asking whether New Zealand’s protein expertise could be applied to a source that didn’t depend on animals.

The answer came through Rubisco, the most abundant protein on Earth, found in every green leaf, but historically difficult to extract in a form that works in food. Leyland Penno co-founded Leaft Foods in 2019 with Dr John Penno, bringing together her commercial and strategic experience with his deep knowledge of New Zealand’s primary sector. The company set out to extract Rubisco from locally grown leaf crops and turn it into a protein isolate with an amino-acid profile comparable to animal protein, neutral in taste, high in function and produced from plants that can be grown without converting new land.

Based in Selwyn, Canterbury, Leaft Foods has grown to around 35 people. It has attracted backing from Khosla Ventures, Ngāi Tahu Holdings and other investors and in 2025 signed a commercialisation partnership with Lacto Japan, a signal that the company’s protein is moving from pilot to market. Its founders’ dairy-industry pedigree gives it a credibility that most alternative-protein startups lack: these are people who understand the industry they’re building alongside.

Leyland Penno’s profile is noteworthy because she represents a particular kind of New Zealand founder, someone who came from the incumbent industry, understood its strengths and limits and decided to build the next version rather than fight the old one. The full company story is in Leaft Foods: making protein from leaves, and Leaft features as the strongest entry in New Zealand food-tech startups to watch.

Sources: Leaft Foods · NZ Herald · Stuff