I’m Maury Leyland, and together with my husband John Penno, we co-founded Leaft Foods.
Our story began in 2016 at Stanford University. We were sitting in an executive education classroom buzzing with ideas about the future of food, but something didn’t feel right. Were we polishing the past, or truly shaping the future?
We had both spent our careers building businesses we believed in. But surrounded by future-focused thinkers, we began the uncomfortable process of questioning everything — our assumptions, our impact, and how to create a food system we could genuinely believe in.
We wanted, above all, to help farmers shift toward lower-impact, higher-value production. What followed were years of late-night calls, whiteboard sketches, deep dives, and dead ends. Then came the realisation: the answer had been hiding in plain sight. Rubisco - the most abundant, highly nutritious protein on the planet - found in every green leaf and forming the basis of all the proteins we eat today.
The question was whether extracting it was possible, when so many had failed before. By 2019, we were ready to try. We joined forces with Ross Milne, an engineer who had spent his career designing some of the world’s largest food factories and, like us, was re-examining his place in the future of food.
Together with our expanding team we became obsessed with unlocking Rubisco and making fresh green leaves the new frontier of protein. It wasn’t easy - we broke equipment, ruined countless trials, and destroyed the fragile molecules again and again. But persistence paid off: we finally cracked the code to extract Rubisco at commercial scale while preserving its remarkable functionality.
Rubisco drives photosynthesis — life’s original process. It dissolves, foams, gels, and emulsifies like eggs or whey, with superior nutrition and zero allergens. Using New Zealand’s food-production expertise, we perfected a gentle process with alfalfa, a crop that’s been nourishing soil and animals for millennia.
We’ve proved that something extraordinary is possible. The next food revolution won’t come from the lab — it will come from nature’s original invention. The future is green.
Maury and John
Co-founders, Leaft Foods