We're chickpea
people.
NuCicer was a mission that found a business, not the other way around. After more than 20 years of gathering and studying the vast array of chickpea genetics, our team of scientists and agronomists decided that this wealth of potential needed to be shared with the world.
Our unmatched breeding and management expertise and wealth of genomics and bioinformatics makes NuCicer the leading authority on chickpeas. We are working with farmers, producers and policy makers across the globe to improve the health and well-being of eaters and ecosystems alike.
We believe meaningful science, natural innovation and tasty products are the key to creating the regenerative food system the world so desperately needs.
Our Team
Kathryn Cook
Chief Executive Officer
Kathryn is a technical and business manager with proven success managing multimillion-dollar programs across industries including materials science, aerospace, and artificial intelligence.
Sean MacEachern
Chief Technology Officer
Sean has spent 20 years at the intersection of cutting-edge tech and agriculture - harnessing big data, finding new applications and utilizing advanced analytics to address critical agricultural challenges.
Doug Cook
Chief Scientific Officer
A world-renowned plant and microbial geneticist studying chickpea and nitrogen fixation. Doug is a professor at UC Davis and among the decade's most highly cited researchers.
Jerry Steiner
Board Member
Jerry spent his career in science driven ag companies including 30 years with Monsanto, Co-founder/CEO of CoverCress, and is currently an Independent director of several ag tech startups.
NuCicer in the News
September 10, 2025
Mars Snacking and Unreasonable Group Welcomes Fourteen New Ventures to Unreasonable Food
Today, as part of the Unreasonable Food collaboration, Mars and Unreasonable Group are welcoming the next generation of growth stage ventures into the Unreasonable Food family.
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June 30, 2025
NuCicer Raises $11.5M to Scale High-Protein Chickpeas and Accelerate Predictive Breeding Platform
Breakthrough high-protein chickpea variety answers rising demand for sustainable and minimally processed protein ingredients.
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September 6, 2024
Startup of the Month: NuCicer
When thinking about staple crops globally, what comes to mind? Probably corn, wheat or rice. But one legume has been overlooked and underutilized for far too long, according to Kathryn Cook, CEO and co-founder of food tech startup NuCicer.
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September 1, 2024
Are Chickpeas the Future of Alt-Protein? NuCicer is Working On It
Alt-meat today is typically made from soybeans, yellow peas, wheat, or some combination of those three crops. But there's a whole world of plants out there that could widen the world of ingredients available to manufacturers.
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June 11, 2024
NuCicer Unlocking the Potential of the Humble Chickpea to Transform the Food System
NuCicer, the company with the world's most diverse chickpea breeding library, looks to address urgent challenges within our food and agriculture systems by unlocking the full potential of the chickpea.
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May 20, 2024
Five genius inventions that grew out of UC research
NuCicer: Upping the garbanzo game with ancestral genetics.
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December 4, 2023
Plant protein for a regenerative food system
The vital connection between legumes and soil health in our food system.
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July 20, 2023
10 New Foods Coming To Our Plates In The Next 10 Years
In an intimate cocktail bar in downtown San Francisco owned by celebrity chef Dominique Crenn on July 1, a select group of consumers became the first Americans to receive a taste of the future.
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June 22, 2023
NuCicer is PPIC's newest Affiliate member
PPIC is excited to welcome NuCicer as PPIC's newest Affiliate member! Through their proprietary variety development platform, NuCicer has successfully developed non-GMO chickpeas with 75% higher protein.
Read →We're retelling the story of Chickpeas.
By improving our staple foods, we can improve our food system as a whole.
Old Chickpeas
NuCicer Chickpeas
