Stories about the NZ companies rethinking protein, fermentation and the future of food.

New Zealand’s economy runs on food, and a growing group of founders are now applying biology, engineering and data to how protein itself is made.

The “fermentation” part has been with us for millennia, bread, beer, cheese, yoghurt. The “precision” part means using modern biology to make a microbe.

Leaft Foods, founded by Maury Leyland Penno and Dr John Penno, extracts Rubisco, the world’s most abundant protein, from green leaves and turns it into a high-value food ingredient grown on Canterbury farmland.

Daisy Lab is rethinking dairy — producing animal-identical whey proteins using precision fermentation from its base in New Zealand.
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