{"id":556650,"date":"2026-07-24T01:44:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T01:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/556650\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T01:44:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T01:44:15","slug":"schreiber-foods-leads-9m-round-in-plantopia-as-oat-grown-casein-moves-toward-factory-production-vegconomist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/556650\/","title":{"rendered":"Schreiber Foods Leads $9M Round in Plantopia as Oat-Grown Casein Moves Toward Factory Production – vegconomist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israeli molecular farming company Plantopia<\/a> has closed a $9 million funding round led by US dairy manufacturer Schreiber Foods<\/a> and food-focused investor Siddhi Capital<\/a>, taking total capital raised past $16 million. The company will direct the money toward a production facility at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, on Israel\u2019s Mediterranean coast, scheduled to start operating in the third quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n

Plantopia grows casein inside sprouted oats rather than in fermentation tanks. Casein<\/a> accounts for roughly 80% of the protein in cow\u2019s milk and governs how cheese coagulates, stretches and melts, functionality that soy and oat-based cheese alternatives have struggled to reproduce. The company says it has expressed all four principal casein subtypes, \u03b1s1, \u03b1s2, \u03b2 and \u03ba, and describes itself as the first platform to do so, a claim vegconomist has not independently verified.<\/p>\n

Oats replaced lettuce as the production crop<\/p>\n

The company, founded in 2018 by Prof. Alexander Vainstein, Tal Lutzky and Amir Tiroler, operated under the name Pigmentum before rebranding and originally used lettuce as its host plant. Lutzky told AgFunderNews<\/a> in January 2025 that the switch to oats was made because the crop delivers higher expression levels across all four casein proteins. The underlying biotechnology came out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem\u2019s Faculty of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

Indoor vertical cultivation of engineered sprouts is the basis of the company\u2019s cost argument. Plantopia says the method operates without livestock, farmland or sunlight, and requires less capital expenditure than precision fermentation, which depends on stainless steel bioreactors and dedicated facilities.<\/p>\n

\"Plantopia\"\u00a9 Plantopia<\/p>\n

A conventional dairy manufacturer takes the lead position<\/p>\n

Schreiber Foods is among the largest privately held dairy processors in the world, supplying cheese to retail and foodservice customers globally. Its position at the front of the round places an incumbent processor directly behind an animal-free casein supplier. <\/p>\n

Several companies are pursuing plant-grown casein on similar timelines. PoLoPo<\/a> and Finally Foods are working with potatoes, NewMoo with soybeans, Alpine Bio<\/a> with soy in the US, and New Zealand\u2019s Miruku<\/a> with oilseed crops. <\/p>\n

Lutzky said, \u201cPlantopia\u2019s technological achievement is the holy grail of dairy proteins, proteins that are identical in composition to those found in cow\u2019s milk. Having completed the development stages that have been our focus in recent years, we are now moving into commercial production.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israeli molecular farming company Plantopia has closed a $9 million funding round led by US dairy manufacturer Schreiber…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-556650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}