Viva la Faba: from lockdown experiment to award-winning vegan cheese
Forget everything you know about vegan cheese. Viva la Faba is transforming plant-based dairy with Europe’s first organic faba bean cheese, combining bold sustainability credentials with authentic taste, and a melt to please even the most hardcore cheese enthusiast.
Curd Your Emissions with Viva la Faba
In the middle of a pandemic lockdown, two bioeconomy students turned their shared kitchen flat into a test lab, armed with nothing but curiosity, corn by-products, and a stubborn belief that sustainable food should and could taste better.
That late-night experiment became Viva la Faba, a German startup now leading the charge on plant-based dairy innovation. With a proprietary process that unlocked the full potential of regeneratively grown faba beans, they’ve created an award-winning brand, is proving that small ideas can have a big impact.
The Legume Effect
Cheese might be delicious, but it’s also one of the most environmentally costly foods on our plates. While meat often gets the blame, dairy products like cheese pack a surprising climate punch, contributing to up to 13 kg of CO2 equivalent per kilo of cheese, depending on the type and production method. Some aged cheeses even hit 16.75 kg/CO2e/kg by the time they reached the shelf. (1)
Multiply it by the over 10,000,000 tonnes of cheese eaten annually in Europe alone, and that footprint becomes enormous. In fact, dairy is responsible for a significant chunk of the 14.5% of global emissions linked to animal agriculture. And because cheese is calorie-dense and often made from milk – with all its associated animal feed and water-intensive systems – its land use and water consumption are disproportionately high. (2)
Still, consumer behaviour is shifting. People want to eat more sustainably, but when it comes to cheese, they feel stuck. Most vegan options don’t deliver on taste, texture, or nutrition, and the gap keeps people buying dairy even when they’re trying to cut back.
In short: we’re hooked on a food that’s bad for the planet, and the alternatives haven’t convinced us otherwise… yet.
From Pitch to Pulse
Since its founding in 2021, Viva la Faba has moved fast and made it count. They have developed Europe’s first organic certified vegan cheese made from regeneratively grown faba beans, tackling one of the most environmentally intensive foods in the modern diet. In partnership with the University of Hohenheim, a 2024 study confirmed that their cheese-cut submissions reduced emissions by up to 75% compared to traditional dairy – a massive reduction with the potential to reshape the carbon footprint of cheese lovers' diets across Europe. (3)
They have become so much more than a lab-grown concept. The team has scaled production to 3 tonnes a day, with a co-manufacturer establishing a permanent R&D and operations space in Stuttgart. It has built a small, growing workforce that now includes four full-time staff, two students, and a recent graduate. Their crowdfunding campaign raised over €20,000 and secured more than 1,000 preorders, showing strong early appetite from consumers and proving that sustainable choices don’t have to mean compromise.
They’ve already been recognised with major prizes, including the PETA Vegan Food Award for Best Vegan Cheese, and the 2024 Baden-Württemberg Bioeconomy Prize.
No Whey, Just Results
For Viva la Faba, this isn’t just rethinking what cheese is made of; it’s rethinking who benefits from the way food is made. At the heart of the company’s mission is a belief that sustainability must be local, inclusive, and rooted in real relationships. That’s why they partnered with former dairy farmers in southern Germany to help convert land for organic faba bean production, ensuring their work is not about replacing farmers but giving them a future in a changing food economy. The shift is already tangible: beans now grow where cows once grazed, and new supply chains are being built to prioritise biodiversity, fair pay and regional resilience.
Every decision the team makes – from using organic ingredients to investing in local suppliers – feeds into a bigger goal: helping consumers eat better without putting more pressure on the planet or the people who grow their food. In doing so, Viva la Faba is building a community around their renovation, one that connects farmers to consumers, science to flavour, and sustainability to something you actually want to put on toast.
At their current capacity, Viva la Faba could help mitigate up to 8,850 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, which is the same as taking over 4,000 petrol cars off the road or powering nearly 1,800 homes. For every kilo sold, the climate wins, and for a product as culturally beloved and nutritionally dense as cheese, that’s a rare and powerful kind of impact.
Sow What? Lessons in Leading Innovation
From the outset, Viva la Faba’s Journey is closely connected with the EIT Food ecosystem. Their founders entered the 2020 Food Solutions programme, and that proved to be the springboard for late-night lockdown innovations. The programme offered funding, industry mentoring, R&D support, and access to the EIT Food Network, all of which Viva la Faba points to as indispensable in turning their prototype into a launch-ready product.
Alumni ventures like Viva la Faba are examples of how EIT Food’s education and entrepreneurship pathways (including master’s and PhD programmes, upskilling academies, venture coaching) help startups scale. Find out more in the paper: ‘How EIT Food fosters bioeconomy entrepreneurship: From policy to people – and back’ (5)
The Food Solutions programme opened so many doors for us. It gave us access to funding, industry connections, R&D support, and, most importantly, an amazing network through EIT Food. That network really helped turn our idea into something tangible.
Get the Grow-How
Viva la Faba’s rise from student kitchen to climate-smart food innovator offers more than a good story – it’s a real-world example of how impact-driven startups can find their footing, challenge assumptions, and scale meaningfully in a complex food system. Whether you’re a founder, a funder, or a policymaker, here are five takeaways from their journey so far:
1. Start with a real problem and be willing to pivot.
The team behind Viva la Faba didn’t set out to make cheese. They began with a wider mission: using faba beans to build better plant-based foods. Cheese became the focus only after they saw how poorly existing options performed and how strong public demand was for something better. Get attached to solving the right problems, not to your first idea.
2. Use competitions and early-stage programmes as springboards, not destinations.
Winning EIT Food’s “Leaf to Root” challenge gave them funding, visibility, and a first connection to the food innovation ecosystem. But they didn’t stop there. Using this success, they built momentum, used the feedback, and kept developing their concept into a business. Programmes like this are launchpads, not finish lines.
3. Build sustainability into the DNA of your product, not as an afterthought.
Viva la Faba didn’t just replace milk with beans; they built an entirely new process to make the beans melt, stretch and satisfy. Their environmental impact isn’t just from swapping ingredients, but from designing a value chain that includes regenerative farming, organic sourcing, and minimal processing. Sustainable products work best when sustainability shapes the recipe, not just the marketing.
4. Validate with real people often and early.
Viva la Faba ran thousands of consumer taste tests and used crowdfunding to build both capital and confidence. That early validation helped them improve the product, secure investment, and prove demand to potential partners. Don’t wait until launch to find out what people think.
5. Start with a dream, then take it pro.
The idea was born in a flatshare kitchen, but it grew because the founders invested in facilities: a production site, an R&D lab, and a central hub in Stuttgart. Having a physical space to test, scale, and distribute their product gave them credibility and control, two things that matter just as much as a good recipe.
Viva la Faba are flipping the whole cheese board. They’ve created a blueprint for how we can feed a growing population without chewing through the planet’s resources.
Consumers are hungry for plant-based options that actually deliver on taste, and retailers are on the lookout for products that tick both the flavour and sustainability boxes. Viva la Faba has a unique product, strong early demand, and an approach that’s already winning awards. But to go from local hero to European staple, they’ll need more than great meltability.
There’s also a bigger cultural shift at play. To really change the food system, we need to reframe what “better” looks like, and that is not just lower emissions, but better soil, better jobs, better health, better taste. Viva la Faba is already showing how that’s possible. With the right investment and a few more seats at the table, they could turn a smart idea into a full-on food revolution.
Let’s face it: the world doesn’t need more ultra-processed cheese copies. It needs food that’s good to eat, good to grow, and good for the planet. And this little bean might just be the start.
- Canellada et al., Environmental Impact of Cheese Production, University of Oviedo (2018) — Traditional full-fat cheeses average 10.2–16.9 kg CO₂e/kg (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29660720/)
- https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/116166617301
- https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679/
- https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
- https://learning.eitfood.eu/news/how-eit-food-fosters-bioeconomy-entrepreneurship-from-policy-to-people-and-back
