When Leyland-Penno arrived in San Diego, she’d just turned 24 and there were only three other women working in Team New Zealand – a sailmaker, a marketer and a receptionist.
“I was out on the boat every single day – grinding and sailing for eight or nine hours, six days a week. My official role was in the design team, but I was also sailing as a navigator and doing performance analysis,” she says.
An expert in computational fluid dynamics – using mathematics to figure out how water and air flows affect speed – she was entrusted with driving the travel lift, working alongside the boatbuilders long after coming off the water.
“Then I would catch up on performance analysis work on Sunday, when I wasn’t supposed to be working,” she says. “It was definitely a burnout situation. It was an amazing experience, but in hindsight, I didn’t have any guidance or support.”
The stress and relentless workload took a toll on Leyland-Penno’s body.
“I thought I knew quite a lot about food. But I realise now I didn’t know enough,” she says.
“I was eating plenty – I gained a lot of weight while I was there – but my periods stopped. I didn’t sleep much and when I got back home, I was sick for months afterwards. I just couldn’t get myself back together.”
Maury Leyland-Penno speaking about Leaft Foods in Christchurch.
Today, Leyland-Penno wishes she knew then what she knows now about nutrition and properly fuelling as an athlete. Her latest work – extracting high-performing protein from leafy forage crops farmed in the South Island – could have benefited her own career, as it’s already proving to help elite female athletes improve their iron and restore healthy menstrual cycles.
After San Diego, with the next America’s Cup five years away, Leyland-Penno decided to take her engineering science skills into the corporate world. A mother of three, she went on to become a key member of the executive team at New Zealand’s biggest company, Fonterra, helping steer the co-operative through some challenging periods, including the 2013 botulism scare.
In 2019, Leyland-Penno and her husband, John Penno – who started Synlait Milk – co-founded Leaft Foods, a start-up focused on harvesting the world’s most abundant protein, rubisco, from the leaves of forage crops, like lucerne.
The couple live on a farm in Canterbury, where they’re committed to finding more diverse and sustainable uses for the land – wanting to create something that would “truly make a difference” to the future of food, Leyland-Penno says.
After years of research, they finally cracked the code – successfully extracting rubisco, the protein that drives photosynthesis in every green leaf, at a commercial scale. “Many have tried to extract rubisco protein in the past, but nobody has got this far,” she says.
A discovery to emerge from that work is Leaft Blade – a performance fuel shot combining the rubisco protein with other macronutrients in a liquid form that’s rapidly digested.
“There’s been little research into protein metabolisation and benefits for women so it’s a space we’re keen to lean into,” Leyland-Penno says.
Giving athletes a performance edge wasn’t the Pennos’ starting point.
“New Zealand needs a future beyond dairy, a future where we have high-value exports, because we’re a country totally dependent on them, and we need to lighten our environmental footprint,” Leyland-Penno says.
“It was through that journey we came across the concept of extracting rubisco, the most abundant protein on earth. We knew New Zealand grows green leaf crops like pasture better than anybody else. We’ve got the beautiful soils, the rainfall, the climate and innovative farmers to make it work.”
Lucerne – known in other parts of the world as alfalfa – is the oldest domesticated forage crop and one of the most productive. “It’s perennial, deep-rooted so it’s drought tolerant, and it fixes its own nitrogen. So the environmental footprint of producing the rubisco protein is far lower than from meat or dairy,” Leyland-Penno says.
Leaft co-founders Maury Leyland-Penno and John Penno.
Leaft’s lucerne farmers in Southbridge – where All Black Dan Carter has his roots – produce 2.5 times more protein per hectare than a Canterbury dairy farm, with 94% fewer emissions, and 97% less water use.
The first protein that Leaft produced was a rubisco protein isolate, which can replace whole egg in baking and is used to make creamy yoghurt and foamy coffee. It’s now exported to Japan.
As Leaft’s team of scientists and engineers learned more about the protein, they developed a product to trial with athletes for performance and recovery.
“We didn’t necessarily know where Leaft Blade sat, but it’s clear that high-performing female athletes is where it fits best,” says Leaft Food’s head of go-to-market, Nathan Sheppard, who’s also an adventure racer and ultramarathon runner.
About six months ago, the company tried Leaft Blade with a woman who wasn’t an elite athlete, who struggled with low iron levels. “After taking the product, her levels increased by 48%,” he says. “It made us think there’s something more in this. So that’s been exciting wrapping our heads around it – we now have elite female athletes starting to notice the difference.”
Among them is Sheppard’s sister, professional cyclist Samara Sheppard, who represented New Zealand at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, finishing ninth in the women’s cross country mountain bike race.
Kiwi mountain biker Samara Sheppard.
Earlier this year, she broke her hand racing in the Lifetime Grand Prix offroad series in the US and started taking Leaft Blade to see if it could aid her recovery.
“I’ve been lucky to have access to it, put it through its paces, and recognise the benefits,” says Sheppard, who takes care of bike projects for Destination Wollongong in Sydney when she’s not racing.
“I was getting extra protein on a daily basis and the rubisco was super digestible. But the biggest benefit I’ve noticed has been with my menstrual cycle.”
While training at 2200m altitude in Mexico for seven weeks, the cyclist saw the change. “In an endurance sport, we try to monitor our cycles in terms of energy, making sure we don’t go into the red. And this was the first time I’d done an altitude stint for that long and kept a regular menstrual cycle,” she says.
“I didn’t change anything in my training, but I’d been taking the Leaft Blade every day. It must’ve been a combination of the macronutrients and the iron, and I felt better for it. I first saw it as a protein supplement to keep your muscles strong and help them repair from training – so to have that extra outcome was really cool.”
Sheppard, who’s training towards the Oceania Gravel Championship and the UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Champs next year, takes frozen pouches of the product on training rides – each with 18g of protein – and notices a “brain lift” from it as well.
Olympic kayaker Lucy Matehaere started taking Leaft Blade after the Paris Olympic Games, struggling to get enough protein to fuel her intense training.
“I have to eat quite a lot of protein each day and it can be tricky to get it at the right times – I don’t want to eat a chicken breast before going for a hard session in the morning,” she says. “I’ve noticed having a Leaft protein hit in the morning has helped my energy across the day.”
As well as training for next year’s world championships in Poland, Matehaere is completing her postgraduate degree in biomedical science. Her metabolism studies give her an insight into how rubisco works.
“It’s really cool to have that background understanding, but also the curiosity to experiment with this,” she says. “Nutrition is one of the key factors that drives performance – the more consistent your training, the better your improvements over time. So being able to fuel well day on day, week on week, is crucial for me.”
Male and female athletes in New Zealand and the US are now using the product. “Swimmers, runners, surfers, fighters, wrestlers and snowboarders,” Nathan Sheppard says. “A big motivation for us is interacting with these amazing athletes, knowing they’re genuinely benefiting from it, and it’s supporting their professional careers.”
For Leyland-Penno, the “long, deep dive” into nutrition has been hugely satisfying.
“I was an engineer on the design team who did a whole lot of sailing, rather than being a professional athlete myself, but my journey since then through food and nutrition has become really important to me,” she says. “Women don’t have to be athletes to benefit from this, either. I’m menopausal, so there’s never been a better time.”
Although she recently took up wing foiling, Leyland-Penno is more at home on a farm bike or tractor these days. But the change to the America’s Cup rules for 2027, where every crew must include a woman, has been heartening.
“These women haven’t had the same opportunities or experience, so how else do you bridge this divide?” she says. “I feel inspired by the women who are doing it – Jo Aleh is an incredible athlete. I love seeing it. It’s brought back new interest to me.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.