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When thinking about staple crops globally, what comes to mind? Probably corn, wheat or rice. But one legume has been overlooked and underutilized for far too long, according to Kathryn Cook, CEO and co-founder of food tech startup NuCicer. By applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding, her Davis-based company aims to elevate the chickpea as a key crop to address growing food demands while also improving crop resilience, yield and nutritional value. 

“When we think about the food that we eat and ingredients, the reality is, they’re just another set of materials,” says Cook, whose versatile background spans materials science, aerospace and AI. “They have their own functional and nutritional properties as a result of their chemical structure, and we get that structure from the varieties that we’re using for those ingredients.”

Co-founder Douglas Cook, a UC Davis professor of plant pathology (and Cook’s father), started focusing on chickpeas more than 15 years ago. His team, which includes co-founder Brendan Riley, has gathered hundreds of samples from wild relatives of chickpeas, increasing the crop’s genetic diversity about 40 times through a crossbreeding program. The result? A chickpea variety with 50-75 percent more protein that’s better for the soil and requires less water to grow, Cook says.

Since officially launching in 2020, the startup has been rising fast. A $1 million grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research kicked things off. To date, the company has raised nearly $12 million in two rounds. NuCicer, which has a team of about 23, has also started earning revenue by supplying its high-protein chickpeas as a key ingredient for companies’ production processes. 

“When we think about plant breeding, that really speaks to a lot of the data sets and machine learning that I had been doing previously,” Cook says. “So I’m not an agronomist or plant geneticist by any stretch of the imagination, but I think this idea that we can breed for ingredient qualities — and not just thinking about breeding from an agriculture side, thinking about it from a food perspective — really excites me.”

This summer, NuCicer placed second in the Institute for Food Technologists’ 2024 IFT FIRST pitch competition, one of the most prominent pitch competitions in the food tech world. As the startup grows, Cook says, the team is focused on improving disease tolerance, yield tolerance and the length of growing season to give more value to growers and consumers.

The team’s commitment to improving the entire food chain was among the standout qualities that attracted Sara Olson, senior director of Ventures Investments, Agriculture at Leaps by Bayer. From enhanced traits like maturity timing and reduced herbicide use to increased protein content and improved flavor, the NuCicer chickpea offers benefits for farmers, processors and consumers, adds Olson, an investor and company advisor. These advantages spurred Ventures Investments to lead NuCicer’s seed round in 2022 with an undisclosed amount. 

Although the product “speaks for itself so clearly,” Olson says, disrupting an existing market comes with its share of challenges. In this case, the question is whether customers on a wide scale will be receptive to this new-and-improved legume.

“The challenges will be about getting their foot in the door,” Olson says. “Convincing people to open their minds to how much better a chickpea can be.”

This doesn’t seem to be a major issue. The feedback has been positive so far and this chickpea is “objectively better,” Olson says. She also praises the NuCicer team — which includes molecular biologists, plant breeders and sensory experts — for effectively collaborating across their diverse and highly technical backgrounds.

With her father on the team, Cook has a strong personal connection that creates a solid foundation. Even when they have differences of opinion, they know they can work through it because “we have that history,” she says. This working relationship also allows them to get to know each other from a different perspective, she adds.

“I grew up going to his lab at the university and seeing his grad students, seeing his projects,” Cook says. “I never intended to get into the food tech space where he was playing, but you just never know where life’s going to take you.”

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