Climax Foods: From rocket science to data science
Making the next-generation of plant-based foods might not be rocket science, but it will take a hefty dose of data science, predicts the astrophysicist behind Climax Foods, a Berkeley-based startup on a mission to reverse engineer animal foods and re-build them from plants, piece by molecular piece, starting with cheese.
“We want to essentially replace cows and other animals as inefficient factories for converting plants into meat and dairy,” says Oliver Zahn, PhD (linkedin strapline: ‘Astrophysicist interested in making Earth a better place’), who recently raised $7.5m in seed capital.
The plan is to use machine learning (among other things) to model what happens when you combine certain proteins with certain fats with certain carbohydrates, and predict what the texture, smell, or functionality might be, experimenting with hundreds of thousands of small molecules, something that would take millennia to test for real, he says.
“It’s about innovating faster, using machine intelligence to simplify and speed up the formulation process, to optimize flavor, texture, nutrition and price, because right now, a lot of plant products are not better than animal products and in some cases they are actually worse.”