Aerospace to Agriculture: Using AI & Ancestral Genetics to Build the Future of Food, Kathrynn Cook, NuCicer
Reimagining the Chickpea from the Seed Up
Stefanie LaHart doesn’t need convincing that chickpeas deserve a place at the table. They turn up in her breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and even smoothies. But when Kathrynn Cook, Co-Founder and CEO of NuCicer, joins her on The Wild Party Podcast, the conversation moves beyond favorite recipes into a question most consumers rarely consider: What could change if we improved the seed itself?
For Cook, that question connects a career that might initially seem unlikely. Her background spans materials science, aerospace, and machine learning. Agriculture is another expression of the curiosity that has followed her through each chapter.
“It all starts with curiosity,” she says. “I always want to understand how things work.”
Following the Questions
As an engineering student, Cook kept asking why equations worked and what made structures behave as they did. Materials science offered an answer by taking her down to the atomic building blocks of the physical world.
That perspective carried into aerospace and later Facebook, where she worked on an aerospace program before moving into voice assistants. Each transition meant learning unfamiliar systems and accepting the discomfort of being a beginner.
“Part of it is just accepting and being okay with discomfort,” she says. “You’re not gonna know everything.”
Eventually, Cook wanted to return to physical products. As interest in alternative proteins grew, she began thinking about where plant-based eating might lead over time. Her vision included familiar foods with naturally useful nutritional qualities.
“It lands in just really delicious whole foods,” she says.
Chickpeas stood out for their versatility and their potential as ingredients. The opportunity also connected with something much closer to home.
A Family Connection to the Field
Cook remembers childhood road trips that included stops at farm fields with her father, UC Davis Professor Douglas Cook. He would look at the crops, how they were growing, and signs of disease. Plant science was part of the landscape of her childhood long before it became her business.
His research into wild chickpea relatives opened access to genetic diversity beyond the narrower pool used in cultivated varieties. That diversity offered possibilities in seed composition, plant structure, disease tolerance, and growing season length.
Cook and her father co-founded NuCicer, spinning the company out of UC Davis around 2020.
Their work combines ancestral wild chickpeas with modern cultivated varieties. Cook explains that wild plants alone would not necessarily meet farmers’ needs. Valuable traits have to be brought into varieties that can be grown and harvested practically.
NuCicer uses machine learning to help understand genetics and guide breeding decisions, while the breeding itself relies on traditional cross-pollination.
“We still cross-pollinate,” Cook says.
Looking Beyond the Nutrition Label
Higher protein is an important part of NuCicer’s work, but Cook’s explanation reaches beyond a single nutritional claim. She describes breeding chickpeas that perform better within existing milling and ingredient production systems, while retaining their fiber.
Her example is a snack formulated with wheat flour, added protein isolate, and a separate fiber ingredient. Chickpea flour could supply some of those qualities together, potentially simplifying both the ingredient list and production.
“Well, let’s just replace part of that wheat flour with chickpea flour that already has the protein and fiber in it,” she says.
For NuCicer, testing includes what happens throughout the supply chain. How does a variety perform in the field? How does it move through milling equipment? What does it taste like? What texture does it produce, and do the economics work?
“We need to be thinking of this as a system,” Cook says.
That thinking also connects food demand with farming practices. Cook explains that farmers need a market for chickpeas before they have an incentive to grow them. Greater demand could create more opportunities to use chickpeas in rotations and capture the crop’s nitrogen-fixing benefits.
Building Through Partnerships
NuCicer operates primarily as a seed company, developing varieties and producing planting seed with growers. Processing and finished foods depend on partners.
At the time of the interview, Cook described progress from an initial 10 seeds to approximately 10,000 acres. Reaching a much larger scale means working with businesses that already have grower networks, processing expertise, and established customer relationships.
“We don’t need to own every stage of this,” she says.
As the conversation closes, Cook returns to the need for crops that serve the food system we are building now.
“We need new crops for modern food,” she says.
This is a fresh perspective on an everyday favorite. For Cook, it is a business taking shape through the same habit that started her journey: asking how things work, then exploring how they could work better.
Learn more at www.nucicer.com.
