Biofach 2025: New Roots CEO on crafting nutritious and sustainable vegan cheese
28 Feb 2025 | New Roots
At the recent Biofach 2025 trade show, Freddy Hunziker, founder and CEO of New Roots, shared how the company ensures its vegan cheeses and dairy alternatives match the taste and nutrition of traditional dairy. He discussed New Roots’ commitment to sustainability, maintaining high nutritional quality while scaling production, and balancing affordability with its mission — donating 1% of sales to animal shelters. With the rising demand for plant-based dairy, Hunziker also unveiled New Roots’ latest innovations, including a cashew-based soft cheese, artisanal vegan cheeses, plant-based fondue, and a lupin-based protein-rich cheese.
So hello, welcome to Nutrition Insights interview.
My name is Vina Patel and I'm a senior journalist at Nutrition Insight, and I'm really happy to be talking with you today.
So can you please introduce yourself?
Sure, hello Daniel.
My name is Freddie.
I'm the founder and CEO of New Roots.
Thank you, and I have some questions for you today.
My first question is, so how do you make sure your vegan cheese and dairy alternatives are tasty and nutritious compared to animal dairy?
I think it's very crucial.
We have seen on the market that most of the Dairy cheese alternatives are very problematic in terms of nutritional value, in terms of ingredients, and what we try to do is actually try to, I wouldn't say copy it, but try to mimic cheese in a way that's much more efficient in terms of resources, in terms of the ingredients we're using, and having a cheese that has The same taste and texture as semi-hard or hard cheese, but doesn't have all the nutritional issues as a cheese would have.
For example, we don't have any cholesterol, we don't have any saturated fats.
We don't have any lactose, and I think the future of the cheese really deserves having amazing products which don't have these kind of lax.
And how do your supports support a healthy diet while staying true to values of sustainability?
I think a healthy diet and sustainability and ethical aspects come all hand in hand.
I think a product, when we are launching a new product, it has to be so innovative in order to match all these aspects.
So it has to be super nutritional, so our products is really Especially the new hard cheese, it is one of its kind because it has a full amino acid count as you would find in dairy, so full protein.
Then it has no cholesterol, no saturated fat, and it also emits much less resources or a much smaller footprint than a dairy cheese would produce.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you use to increase the protein.
In the vegan cheese and also how the footprint is much lower in your process.
So what we don't do at New Roots, we don't produce analog cheese.
What we are doing is we look at cheese and we look at what is needed to produce these amazing tastes, these amazing textures that you can find in cheese that makes it highly addictive and that also makes it highly emotional.
And so we take.
Proteins from a special lupin strain that we have developed over the years and we then use an amazing technology, precision fermentation, to modify the proteins, modify the fat in order to have the same functionalities as dairy, and I think that's much more efficient as you would do when you're using cell-based precision fermentation.
Like this, we are going to work hand in hand with the farmers.
We're going to bring nitrogen back into the soil and along the entire value chain, we are working with all the main stakeholders.
Our product is also is very crucial.
We can also produce it on existing dairy infras.
Structure.
Once the milk is produced, that was one of the biggest challenges in R&D to really mimic the same process on local infrastructures and like this, we think that the transformation will happen much, much faster because we can work hand in hand with the cheese makers.
And so I read that you donate 1% of your sales to animal shelters.
And how do you balance this with making affordable and nutritious products?
I think we're tired of seeing companies that are just in for the money.
I think every company should have a proper value and should contribute to societal change, and that's exactly the mission of New Roots.
What we try to do is help transform the entire dairy agriculture system together with farmers, and that's why we contribute 1% of our sales to farmers, helping.
The to transfer to local ingredients, local plant-based ingredients, and I think that should be exactly the mission of every company.
What do you think?
Why do you place so much emphasis on farming and farmers in the supply chain?
What do you think is not being reflected in the current trends with other companies today?
It's a good question.
Currently the dairy industry is highly obsolete.
First of all, it's highly subsidized, and as long as the industry is subsidized, it cannot really be economically sustainable.
So what we want to do is we want to make sure that we don't keep the farmers out of the equation.
The farmers are one of the most important stakeholders.
What we also want to do is we want to make sure that We take care of the soils.
We want to bring back nitrogen into the soil in order to prevent the soil, also in order to help with the food crop cycles and like this, we make sure that we really have a sustainable agriculture system and we can keep the tradition with cheese being cheese but without all the negative aspects.
