When the Good Food Foundation announced in late January that Berkeley, Calif.-based Climax Foods' plant-based blue cheese won its category in the prestigious Good Food Awards competition, the team that created the cheese immediately booked the Foundation's flight to April 29th. The award ceremony was held in Portland, Oregon. For them, it was the equivalent of the Oscars.
Their victory was a victory for the underdog and a strike for plant-based products. Their blue, or “blue,” based on cashew nuts and made by growing their own tangy mold, competed with artisanal dairy-made cheeses to come out on top. No other plant-based companies were participating in the competition.
On April 22, one week before the awards ceremony, the other shoe dropped. Climax was calmly informed via email that the entry had been disqualified and the win voided because the shoes contained kokum butter (which it didn't) and were not “retail”. “Ready” — Food industry term for meeting GRAS or “Generally Recognized as Safe” standards.
Climax Blue has already been distributed to many fine dining restaurants, including the acclaimed all-vegan Eleven Madison Park in New York City, and will soon be available for retail. Climax has partnered with Bell Group, producers of Boursin and Baby Bell cheeses, on a variety of products. Climax Foods' blue cheese contains common cocoa butter rather than kokum butter, and the manufacturer chose cocoa butter precisely because it meets his GRAS standards.
Immediately after the disqualification, a backlash against the Good Food Foundation erupted among food technologists, academics, researchers, and vegan advocates. At issue was how and why the disqualification came at such a suspicious and dizzying time.
The foundation's website had some new “requirements” for award applicants, but it turns out these were added retrospectively, i.e. after the 2023 application process for the 2024 award. did. In short, the goalposts of the tournament seemed to have been moved.
But the disqualification has more complex roots than that. Going back to the Good Food Foundation's announcement that it would accept plant-based applicants for its 2024 competition, even considering applications from food tech companies has left them under continued barrage from dairy-based cheesemakers. Ta.
To quell the uproar among its core participants, the foundation issued a statement stating that in the future the categories will be separated and in the case of the 2024 food tech winners, dairy winners will also be chosen. Stated.
Climax's founder and CEO, Dr. Oliver Zahn, is a former astrophysicist and quite the detective. Dr. Zahn later said the foundation's disqualification of the team's cheese was done “in direct response to dairy industry stakeholders who contacted[the Good Food Foundation]this month to come up with a way to disqualify us.” He pointed out.
Why did the Foundation choose to withdraw its promise to the dairy lobby to select a dairy winner if the Climax entry were to win, rather than invalidating the Climax entry and rescinding the win? remains unclear. But perhaps the biggest irony is that Climax is already partnering with a world-famous dairy product.
The bottom line? This story seems to be begging Hollywood for a hilarious satire starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as guys in the middle of setting up a food tech startup.