This Gooey Vegan Cheese Brand Imagines the Future of Pizza as the Climate Changes - Adweek

This Gooey Vegan Cheese Brand Imagines the Future of Pizza as the Climate Changes

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Heat waves are raging across the globe this summer, demonstrating precisely how climate change is poised to upend many ways of living—including how we eat.

Specifically, as vegan cheese brand Nobell Foods points out, it’s going to change pizza.

The company’s first campaign comes ahead of its product launch. To build buzz, Nobell recruited a group of writers and artists to create a print magazine, Pizza Futures, exploring how global warming will change our relationship with the saucy, cheese-smothered, carb-rich fan favorite. The publication is accompanied by social content and a few digital and audio ads, all riffing on pizza’s fate.

One spot, set on the future coast of Nevada, advertises dive tours of sunken pizzerias in what one must assume is California, completely submerged in saltwater due to rising sea levels. The campaign represents an effort to engage people on climate in a creative, absurd, playful manner—something the brand hopes will strike a chord amid climate messaging that’s too often preachy or depressing.

“Within climate, at least from the brand side, the dialogue has been [focused] on how food and agriculture impact the planet,” Garett Awad, vp of marketing at Nobell Foods, said. “But we don’t really talk about how the planet impacts food.”

Impossible learnings

Awad is a veteran of Deutsch NY and Toms Shoes who previously worked with Impossible Foods, and Nobell seems to be implementing lessons from the plant-based meat brand. Rather than appealing to crunchy, health-conscious vegans or vegetarians, Nobell is positioning itself as a brand for people who simply love cheese—and pizza—and maybe also have some climate anxiety. After all, climate change is already impacting wheat and tomato crops.

Nobell’s product, made from soybeans that have been modified to produce milk proteins, doesn’t yet have an estimated release date. But it claims to solve one of the textural problems facing many of the available plant-based cheese alternatives. This cheese, Nobell said, melts into that gooey, satisfying stretch of mozzarella as a slice of pizza pulls away from the pie.

“Cheese is an indulgent category, so it makes sense that they would be taste-first,” Sadie Dyer, CPG marketing expert and strategy director at global brand experience firm Siegel+Gale, told Adweek.

But beyond that, Nobell’s messaging seems to be aiming for a sweet spot between the climate-conscious shopper and concern about processed foods.

“What’s interesting about the way that they’re talking about it—they called it ‘plant-grown milk proteins,’ talking about being farm fresh and the power of plants—it’s not language that you do hear a lot with imitation dairy or imitation meats,” Dyer explained. “It’s hard for them to achieve because it does take a lot of processing.”

Pre-product community building

Nobell Foods CEO Magi Richani founded the company in 2016 with seed funding from vegan investor Chris Kerr. Adding Andreessen Horowitz and AgFunder as backers in 2021, Nobell has raised more than $100 million to date.

But it’s not the only startup pursuing this method of making vegan cheese. Brands like Remilk, Real Deal Milk and Change Foods use similar processes, according to Marité Cárdenas Gómez, professor of biomedical science at Spain’s Basque Centre for Biophysics. The companies use “precision fermentation” to produce the milk protein casein—essentially cutting the cows out of the whole cheese-making process.

What sets Nobell apart most distinctly is its brand identity and framing. Copies of the Pizza Futures magazine will be available in four bookshops: Dear Friends Books and Dimes Market in New York City, Now Serving in Los Angeles and Stolen Books in Lisbon, Portugal. The brand is printing 250 hard copies, and people can download the full PDF through the brand’s website if they subscribe to email updates.

“Anchoring climate to pizza and the future of pizza and how climate impacts pizza—while really absurd—we feel like has a chance to get people to think and break through,” Awad said. “We’re trying to tweak and start to mess with the dialogue a little bit.”