New Zealand startup Leaft Foods has introduced its first consumer product, a pre-workout drink made from Rubisco and delivering 17g of complete protein.
Targeting the performance nutrition sector, a New Zealand-based food tech firm is bringing the world’s most abundant protein to market in liquid form.
Unlike most plant proteins, which are derived from the seeds, Rubisco is found in the leaves of green plants, and is a complete protein with significant functional, nutritional and environmental benefits.
The concept is what lends Leaft Foods its name. The startup has introduced its first consumer product, Leaft Blade, a ready-to-drink offering featuring 17g of Rubisco protein that digests up to six times faster than traditional proteins.
Available on its website for NZ$35 ($21) per 100ml pack, the product subverts the status quo of recovery-focused protein drinks by targeting the pre-workout period instead. Leaft Foods suggests consuming it 20 minutes before training to get peak performance from every session.
Leaft Foods’s Rubisco outperforms whey and plant proteins
Founded in 2019 by husband-and-wife duo John Penno and Maury Leyland Penno, Leaft Foods leverages an enzyme found in every plant on Earth. We’ve all consumed a lot of Rubisco without even knowing it.
Nutritionally, it is a complete protein, with high amounts of essential amino acids, resulting in a PDCAAS score similar to beef, egg whites, and dairy proteins. It’s also rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and micronutrients, and easily digestible.
From a functionality viewpoint, Rubisco offers foaming, gelling and emulsification properties, setting just like egg whites in baked goods and posing as an alternative to methylcellulose in plant-based meat. Moreover, it is responsible for carbon fixation and has been targeted in studies looking to increase crop yields, which represents its positive potential to produce climate-friendly foods that preserve food security.
Scientists have been attempting to extract Rubisco from green leaves for over a century, but most efforts destroyed its delicate structure and rendered it worthless. Leaft Foods says it has developed a gentle, food-safe process that preserves protein integrity and unlocks its full potential, leveraging alfalfa as the source crop.
Its ingredient, termed Leaf Rubisco, outperforms other plant proteins like pea and soy, and has a superior amino acid profile to whey protein. It also generates 97% fewer emissions than the latter.
Leaft Blade focuses on ‘proactive’ protein delivery
Leaft Blade contains 50,000 green leaves in each 100ml serving, alongside L-tyrosine to sharpen focus and support brain function, leucine to trigger growth, and tryptophan to restore balance.
The company argues that most protein options are “reactive” as they’re taken after a workout, but its offering is “proactive”. “When you train hard, your muscles send a ‘build’ signal that works best when leucine and other essential amino acids are already in your bloodstream, ready to go,” it explained in a LinkedIn post.
The drink can be taken before or during training to support that critical anabolic window and help you get more from every session, it added. It is meant to be kept in the freezer and consumed just frozen or chilled.
Aside from Leaft Blade, the firm is already delivering commercial-grade Leaf Rubisco protein to multiple markets. “Our technology platform doesn’t just deliver Leaf Rubisco protein; it unlocks value from 100% of the raw material we harvest, creating multiple revenue streams from a single leaf,” it said.
“We’re also working with B2B ingredient customers to formulate Leaf Rubisco protein isolate into their applications, leveraging its unique nutritional, emulsifying, foaming, and gelling properties,” the company added.
Leaft Foods, which raised $15M in Series A funding in 2022, validated its extraction process at pilot scale last year and moved to a 30,000 sq ft commercial-scale demo plant in Canterbury, New Zealand. This facility has the capacity to produce a tonne of Leaf Rubisco products per week.
Others innovating with Rubisco protein include Plantible Foods, which this week opened its own factory to produce hundreds of tonnes of the protein from duckweed in Texas, Israel’s Day 8, and Dutch startup Rubisco Foods.
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