Climax Foods is a plant-based cheese company like no other. Their cheese tastes exactly like dairy-based cheese. That was the conclusion of more than a dozen people who sampled Climax Blue Cheese, Brie and Feta at the party featured in this video, which was a fundraiser for Loving Farm Animal Sanctuary. Turns out that Climax is using artificial intelligence to "...create a new generation of plant-based foods at lower cost to people and planet, indistinguishable in flavor and texture from animal alternatives." The question is: how is Climax Foods doing this? Here's how this cutting-edge company explains it. "Plants are far more genetically diverse than animals and serve as great building blocks for food optimization. We use machine learning frameworks to find out, at the molecular level, what makes animal-based foods so craved and loved by mass consumers. There are infinite combinations of plant-based ingredients that can be optimized to produce indistinguishable alternatives to animal-based products."

Climax's CEO, Dr. Oliver Zahn, has a fascinating and impressive backstory. His biography reads like a sci-fi novel, but it's all very real. "Born
and raised in Bavaria, Germany, with a fond appreciation for its animal agricultural roots, he did his doctoral studies at Harvard and later led UC Berkeley’s Center for Cosmological Physics alongside two Nobel Laureates. After years of studying the intricacies of space and time, his desire to drive positive global change called him to become a data science and thought leader at Google, SpaceX and Impossible Foods before starting Climax in 2020. Armed with the largest-ever seed raise for a food tech startup, Climax converted an old chocolate factory in Berkeley, CA into cutting-edge laboratories. The company's 40 scientists have since combined molecular-level learnings about animal products with proprietary plant ingredient functionality databases to converge on optimal 'digital recipes' from ingredients selected from thousands of edible plants."

It makes sense. Everything about our lives has changed in the last two hundred years: communication, transportation, entertainment.... what about food? Why are we stuck on doing that the same old way? We no longer ride horses to work. Why are we still consuming the breast milk of cows? Says Climax, "We’re bringing together the brightest minds in data science and food science to replace animals with more efficient ways of transforming plants into the foods we love. Using sophisticated data science and machine learning methods, we are unlocking the entire plant kingdom, reaching the pinnacle of taste, texture, and nutrition."
For more information, visit: https://climax.bio
To learn more about Loving Farm Animal Sanctuary, visit:
https://www.lovingfarm.org