CinderBio, Chobani, and Cultivating Collaboration with Food Tech Residency
As part of Chobani’s inaugural food tech program, our Cohort Four fellows Jill Fuss and Steve Yannone worked directly with Chobani staff to understand the role they could play in the yogurt company’s mission: Better food for more people.
When you think of a technology incubator, you probably don’t think: Yogurt!
But perhaps you should.
Chobani, which operates the world’s largest yogurt factory in Twin Falls, Idaho, and has made Greek yogurt a dairy mainstay in the U.S., launched the Food Tech Residency last year as part of the Chobani Incubator program. The Incubator supports startups in the food and beverage industry, and the Food Tech Residency was created to help tech entrepreneurs develop their solutions to the variety of challenges food and beverage manufacturers face.
CinderBio, co-founded by our Cohort Four fellows Jill Fuss and Steve Yannone, produces enzymes for a range of industrial applications, including cleaning key processing equipment for the food and beverage industry. CinderBio was one of the two startups in the residency (the other, Skyven Technologies, sources heat from the sun to supplement industrial boilers) and as part of the program the pair traveled to Chobani’s production facilities to tour and learn about the company’s operations, logistics, quality assurance methods, and supply chain.
They also met with Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya and other Chobani team members to better understand how CinderBio’s products and services can benefit Chobani and others in the food and beverage industry that are looking for effective, sustainable, and non-toxic cleaning solutions.
CinderBio’s class of ultra-stable enzymes operate in hot, acidic conditions, providing an alternative to conventional, harmful chemicals. “We’re not just selling a green product,” explains Fuss. “We’re selling a product that works better than what is currently available.”
The pair found the Chobani Food Tech Residency truly beneficial. “[The Chobani team] was very open to considering new technologies and committing to real work to improve [its] operations and products,” says Yannone, CEO. The Residency allowed he and Fuss to better understand the complexities of a large food processing plant and provided a test-bed outside their own labs in which to put their enzymes to work.
“The measure of [the program’s] success is their success,” says Chobani’s chief marketing officer Peter McGuinness. “If we have success along the way and we learn from them along the way, that’s a beautiful thing.”
