Nature’s Fynd: Creating Delicious Products — and Just Maybe Feeding the World — with a Hardy Little Fungus

Sometimes people find inspiration in the most unusual places. For example, Thomas Jonas — Co-founder and CEO of the Chicago-based Nature’s Fynd food company — found his inspiration in seemingly lifeless acidic volcanic springs in Yellowstone National Park.

Jonas was working with partners on a NASA-funded project to research whether any life forms could survive in extremely hostile natural environments in places, such as the moons of Saturn.

Knowing that Yellowstone is actually a sprawling super-volcano (which explains its geysers that erupt from deep below Earth’s surface), they homed in on the park’s volcanic springs, which Jonas said have the pH and acidity of your car battery. “Don’t go for a swim,” he joked.

But the team was amazed to find an ancient fungus that had adapted to thrive in these springs over many thousands of years. And upon further research, they discovered the fungus was loaded with protein and fiber and low in fat, and the vision of a food source with the potential to feed a rapidly populating and hungry world was born.

Thomas Jonas (center), Co-Founder and CEO of Nature’s Fynd, described the company’s history and processes during a meeting with Naturally Chicago Board members and associates at the company’s Chicago headquarters and factory. Photo by Bob Benenson.

All Nature’s Fynd products are based on this fungus, which the founders named “Fy.” The company name is a play on the word “find,” symbolizing the spirit of exploration that drove the search for extremophile life forms. The “y” that replaced the “i” in Fynd stands for Yellowstone.

It took much trial and error to get the fermentation process down, but the production process at the Nature’s Fynd factory on Chicago’s South Side is surprisingly simple.

Fy fungus is fed a growth-inducing mixture of water, sugar and salt, then is transferred into trays to form sheets of usable product. The mixture is described as similar to sourdough starter, and unless something goes terribly wrong, the company should not need to harvest any additional Fy from its source in Yellowstone.

The sheets can be processed into a meat substitute, Fy milk, and even Fy flour.

The first four products that Nature’s Fynd is marketing are breakfast patties in original and maple flavors, and both original and chive-and-onion cream cheese, available in Mariano’s grocery stores around the Chicago region. This is just the beginning, as the company has done extensive research-and-development and has numerous other products in the queue.

Karuna Rawal (right), Nature’s Fynd’s Chief Marketing Officer, chatted with Naturally Chicago Board member Kim Holstein of the Twisted Alchemy company and Naturally Chicago intern Louis Comte during s product sample at the company’s headquarters. Photo by Bob Benenson

Karuna Rawal, Chief Marketing Officer at Nature’s Fynd, is a member of the Naturally Chicago Board of Directors (the company is also a sponsor of Naturally Chicago). A veteran lead marketer for conventional food brands, she said that she was beyond skeptical about the concept when a job recruiter first contacted her in 2019.

“I got this call about a company I'd never heard of doing something that to me sounded like complete science fiction… This just sounds crazy,” Rawal said. “They're making a protein out of a microbe out of Yellowstone and NASA. I'm like, ‘Yeah, I think I'm good.’ And I actually said no.”

But, Rawal said, she trusted the recruiter, and her husband, a scientist, told her that the crazy idea might just work. So she got to yes, took the job at Nature’s Fynd, and she is glad she did. The company is growing fast with the potential, its leaders say, to feed the world with high-protein, high-fiber and low-fat food products.

Co-founder Jonas had a successful first career in product packaging. Certain that he didn’t want to do that work for the rest of his life, but unsure what to do next, he and his family took a break and lived in Hawaii for two years starting in 2012.

By chance, he met another explorer on a beach who became a partner, and after running through a number of concepts, settled on the idea of addressing both climate change and food shortages through a more sustainable and easily produced source of food.

A slide from Nature’s Fynd shows how the filaments created as the Fy fungus grows, making it a potent source of both protein and fiber.

Their discover of Fy opened up new horizons. They found that the microbe was loaded with protein, all nine essential amino acids, and fiber from the filaments that Fy creates while growing and replicating.

“So here you have a completely new source of protein to the world,” Jonas said. “Actually new is very relative because this is probably older than the cow, except we didn't know it was around.”

It helps a young company — especially one with an out-of-the-mainstream concept that is unknown to most consumers — to have prominent fans. Nature’s Fynd has been fortunate that way. Microsoft founder Bill Gates provided a big visibility boost in February 2021 when he mentioned Nature’s Fynd during a interview for CBS’s “60 Minutes” as one of the companies in which he had invested because they were addressing climate change through food.

CBS alerted Nature’s Fynd about a month ahead of time that the piece would run. Rawal said the marketing team scrambled to create a Breakfast Bundle to take advantage of the publicity — and sold out in 24 hours.

Then earlier this year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided Nature’s Fynd with a grant of nearly $5 million.

Also this year, famed chef Eric Ripert joined Nature’s Fynd as the company’s culinary adviser and created desserts from its products for the menu at his Le Bernadin restaurant in New York City.

Jonas said Nature’s Fynd is predicated on the idea of addressing the world’s food challenges in a way that is kind to the environment. “Here we use about 99 percent less land, we use 99 percent less water, and we make about 94 percent less greenhouse gas,” Jonas said.

He added that the proximity of his factory to downtown Chicago and the relative simplicity of its production process suggests that Nature’s Fynd factories could be set up in population centers around the world. “We can take a warehouse in Shanghai, we can take a warehouse in Delhi, we can take a warehouse in Dubai, and we can start making this, and it doesn't matter whether it rains, temperatures don’t matter. We are climate change resistant,” Jonas said.

Naturally Chicago is proud that Nature’s Fynd is a sponsor and that Karuna Rawal serves on our Board of Directors.

This article was produced by Bob Benenson, Naturally Chicago communications consultant and publisher of the independent Local Food Forum.