Most New Zealand export stories are about volume. More milk solids, more logs, more lamb, priced by someone else on the other side of the world. Leaft Foods is a different kind of story. Time magazine has put the Rolleston company’s Blade protein drink on its 2026 Best Inventions list, calling it “the world’s most abundant protein, in a smoothie”. Chief executive Ross Milne says the real issue now is that demand is outstripping supply.
That is not a puff-piece detail. It is the whole point. Leaft has validated the science and the market. What it needs now is capacity.
A protein everyone knew about and nobody could harvest
Blade is made from Rubisco, the protein that drives photosynthesis in every green leaf on the planet. It is everywhere, but it is diluted and fragile, making up only a small fraction of leaf content compared with protein-dense crops like soy and beans. University of Canterbury protein chemist Grant Pearce told Time that you need enormous volumes of leaves to extract enough for a commercial product, which is why food science had circled it for decades without cracking it.
Leaft’s answer was lucerne, a crop Canterbury farmers already know well, and a processing system that pulls Rubisco out without wrecking its molecular structure. Milne described getting there as “a big journey” of six years of work and investment, and says the company was first to solve extraction and now leads the field globally. The payoff is efficiency: Leaft produces about five times more protein per hectare per year than raising dairy cattle on the same land.
Milne is not modest about where this goes. “Today, no one knows about it. But over the next 10 years, we’re going to see rubisco be one of the main proteins,” he told Time in June, positioning it as a long-term challenger to whey.
Smart money followed the science
The funding story is worth studying for anyone building deep tech in this country. Leaft has raised about $30 million in venture capital from investors including Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, Ngāi Tahu and ACC.
That sits alongside a government co-investment programme that, for once, looks like it bought something. By the end of 2025, the MPI-backed leaf protein programme had attracted $24.4 million in total investment, with industry contributing $14.7 million against MPI’s $9.8 million. The same report recorded a commercial demonstration plant running reliably at higher processing rates, four new lucerne growers onboarded over the 2025 winter and fresh plantings around Southbridge and Leeston.
Industry putting in more than the taxpayer, with a working plant at the end of it, is how co-funding is supposed to work.
Japan put its balance sheet on the table
The strongest signal is not the Time award. It is Tokyo. In 2025, Leaft signed a supply deal with Lacto Japan, with co-founder Maury Leyland Penno saying it would eventually see “hundreds going on thousands of tonnes” of Rubisco isolate shipped to what she called a “highly sophisticated” market, as a plant-based replacement for egg whites and gelling agents.
In June, the relationship moved from customer to shareholder. Lacto Japan’s investor notice confirmed a direct strategic investment in Leaft, aimed at building production and sales infrastructure for Rubisco in Japan. A listed Japanese food multinational does not do that for novelty value. It does it because it expects to sell a lot of the product.
Not a threat to the farm, an upgrade to it
Leaft also sidesteps the tired “plant protein versus pastoral farming” fight. Byproducts from extraction go back to dairy farms as protein-optimised silage, which the company says lifts milk production and cuts nitrous oxide emissions, creating what RNZ described in 2025 as a zero-waste loop between lucerne, extraction and dairy. No wholesale land-use change, no war with farmers. Just more value from the same paddock.
Scale is now the only question
Blade launched in the US earlier this year and Leaft already sells isolate to Japanese and New Zealand food customers, with plans for satellite manufacturing offshore. That last part matters. The risk for New Zealand is that the intellectual property stays here while the volume, and the jobs, are built closer to the customers.
Still, this is what moving up the value chain looks like: a patented process, a product nobody else can make at scale, and buyers queuing for more than can be supplied. If the next five years are spent building capacity fast enough to meet demand, Leaft becomes the template for New Zealand agritech rather than the exception to it.
Sources
- Newstalk ZB: “A big journey”: Kiwi company makes Time Magazine’s top 300 inventions of 2026 (2026-10-19)
- The Post: Canterbury plant-protein smoothie named among Time magazine’s best global inventions (2026-10-15)
- RNZ: NZ green protein producer sprouts new deal with Asian food giant (2025-09-18)
- MPI: October to December 2025 – Leaf Protein Research and Development Programme progress report (2025-Q4)
- Lacto Japan: Notice Regarding Investment in Leaft Foods Limited (2026-06-04)
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