Exclusive: Bettani Farms CEO on Its Acquisitions & Plans to Stretch the Vegan Cheese Category

Nearly four months after making a string of acquisitions, Bettani Farms is looking to overhaul vegan cheese with ramped-up distribution and a “high-stretch” mozzarella alternative.

2025 was a transformational year for Bettani Farms.

The startup formerly known as Climax Foods rebranded with a $6.5M funding round and a new CEO, before buying up three fellow plant-based businesses in Hungry Planet, Numu and Stockeld Dreamery.

Armed with its artificial-intelligence-powered (AI) Caseed ingredient and strengthened product portfolio and distribution, Bettani Farms is now accelerating its mission to get dairy-free cheese in the hands of more Americans.

“We’re trying to do for mozzarella what oat milk has done for coffee,” says Sandeep Patel, a former Califia Farms CFO who took over as Bettani Farms’s chief executive in October.

That mozzarella is on display at the 2026 Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco, where Patel microwaves the product and gleefully stretches it with a fork. By my estimate, the cheese stretch is over two feet long (although it can go way further).

It’s truly impressive for a product that contains no dairy or precision-fermented casein, the dairy protein that gives cheeses their ability to melt and stretch.

“In a recent study, 39% of consumers preferred our cheese to dairy, or had no preference,” he reveals. Non-dairy cheese has a market share of just over 1% of the overall cheese category in the US, much of which comes from cream cheeses, which are “easier to do than mozzarella”.

“We have served up a product that actually performs, tastes and functions like dairy mozzarella. We get stretch, we get milk, we get taste, we get the bite when you chew it,” he says. “We’re able to get 39% [in taste tests]. Frankly, that’s a platinum medal in my book.”

Bettani Farms tackles ‘cold start’ problem through acquisitions

Based in the Bay Area, Bettani Farms decided to acquire the aforementioned companies to shore up its distribution and product offer.

“We’re focused on two key routes to market. One is the away-from-home channel, which is about 55% share of stomach in the US,” says Patel. “So that’s pizzerias, salad chains, etc. And then the other big go-to-market channel is B2B CPG. We want to sell our proprietary protein to companies that can formulate with it, and we want to sell a finished cheese or other finished products.”

For the away-from-home market, he says startups face a classic cold start problem, a chicken-and-egg issue where new products struggle to gain traction due to a lack of initial customers who can drive value. “You can have individual outlets interested in your product, but if you don’t have enough demand in a defined geographic area, it becomes difficult for distributors to stock your product,” explains Patel.

Painting the picture, he says: “So Joe’s Pizza loves our cheese, and says: ‘I’ll order a case a week.’ But your distributor says, ‘You need to have a pallet a week in order for me to be able to bring it in.’ “

That’s an example of the cold start issue. Bettani Farms is looking to tackle it with its acquisition of Hungry Planet, which had a long-standing relationship with Dot Foods, the largest foodservice redistributor in North America.

“[This] enables Joe’s Pizza to order one case through their distributor, which is then supplied by Dot Foods on a truck that has lots of equipment. So when we did all three acquisitions, we immediately put Stockeld’s cream cheese and Numu’s mozzarella onto the Dot platform, combining with Hungry Planet, and opening up distribution for us.”

The takeover of Hungry Planet was curious because its focus was on plant-based meat, rather than just non-dairy cheese. That was intentional, with Bettani Farms looking to tap into the former’s saturated-fat-free plant protein portfolio.

“They’re using vegetable oils. And they also make pizza toppings. So it gives us more baskets to go into pizzerias and other foodservice locations,” Patel outlines. ‘It’s complementary, both from a distribution standpoint and from a product standpoint. Our core focus going forward is cheese, but it helps to have other products that are adjacent.”

Bettani Farms brought on a few employees from acquired companies

It seems the majority of employees at Stockeld Dreamery, Numu and Hungry Planet were not incorporated into Bettani Farms following the takeover.

“We had a transition period where we got a lot of help. We brought on a couple of people from the companies, either full-time or as consultants, but we already had a great team, and we’re now able to actually get more products and scale to match the team that we already have,” says Patel.

“In this funding-scarce market environment, you have to be creative and innovative. We had incredible cooperation from each of the companies. They clearly have developed great products. They want to see them succeed and not just go away. And so they were very helpful to us with continuity of customers and manufacturing.”

Bettani Farms inherited a set of “world-class” co-manufacturers with which the three startups had already established partnerships. “We’re already working with them, not just on continuing production of the existing products, but on launching our next-generation products,” Patel says.

“So that’s also where the acquisitions become very interesting, because again, you have a cold start problem with our next-gen products. But now, we already have the existing relationships with Dot Foods and with customers like Whole Foods, Apollo Bagels and others, that we can then go to and say: ‘Not only do we have the distribution, we have this next-gen product. Do you like it?’

“We’ve already started doing that. We’ve already started getting input from them. ‘What do we not have that you’d like?’ And that’s informing our product development. So we call them design partners. We’re not just designing in a vacuum – we’re actually working with potential customers, with real products, real problems, and solving them with real manufacturing partners.

“So it cuts down development time and really helps us focus on things that are very relevant immediately, and not just in a vacuum. It’s like: ‘What price point, what’s the cost structure, what’s the form factor, what’s the shelf life you need?'”

The company will launch products under its own label, and has already rebranded Stockeld Dreamery’s cream cheese (while retaining the original brand’s name as a callout on the product packaging). It’s now working on relaunching the latter’s cultured Cheddar slices, which it expects to roll out later this year.

To support expansion, Bettani Farms eyes new funding

Bettani Farms uses AI to reverse-engineer what makes cheese taste good, and last year unveiled Caseed, a plant-based casein alternative derived from the seeds of (undisclosed) regenerative crops, which offers a creamy texture, white colour, and neutral flavour profile.

“We have a whole suite of products under development,” says Patel. This includes the “high-melt, high-stretch, high-protein mozzarella” he showcased at Future Food-Tech, a stracciatella-like alternative, feta, goat’s cheese, a cheese sauce for applications like queso and chilli-cheese fries, and a sour cream that builds on the same product chassis as its cream cheese.

“With all of these products, we look at not just where there is actually a good product market fit, but also, can we manufacture it with our existing co-manufacturing partners? Do we have ingredients that we’re using that work well with it? Is there an opportunity to really level up the quality, performance and taste?” he explains.

The company is already expanding its footprint. “We have great customers like Whole Foods. We’re not in every single store, but in stores that have a vegan cheese option, culinary bar, or live pizzas, we are the cheese that they offer,” says Patel.

“It’s not just the number of outlets – it’s which outlet. So you go to Apollo Bagels in Williamsburg. They do a ton of volume, lines around the block. That’s the equivalent of, I don’t know how many bagel shops in places where there may not be [as much traffic].”

Bettani Farms raised $6.5M in a Series A round in October and is now looking for add-on investments of $3-5M to support its expansion, both from existing and new backers.

“So not huge, but that will get us to cashflow break-even, and we’ve already validated our technology at scale through commercial scale-up trials,” says Patel. “We’re doing some more trials, and we hope to be manufacturing protein at scale later this year, and be launching products.

“And again, in away from home, we already have a ready-to-go market infrastructure and a great set of customers to go do that. And we’re also in discussions with many CPG companies around the world about the use of our cheeses in their products.”