From Michelin Stars to Mycelium Mastermind: An Interview with Infinite Roots co-founder Cathy Hutz
Infinite Roots’ (RAC IV) mission is to create a sustainable and nutritious food system based on one ingredient: mushroom mycelium. As a co-founder and VP of Product at Infinite Roots, Cathy Hutz has taken the learnings she gathered in high-end gastronomy, business psychology, and product development to create groundbreaking food that delights both the palate and the planet.
In this interview with our Investment Manager, Agnieszka Sitarska, Cathy shares how her background helps her bring a unique perspective to the company, what sets Infinite Roots apart from its competitors, and how the narrative on gender roles needs to be updated.
Aga: Cathy, your career background is remarkably diverse. You have worked in gastronomy, top restaurants, humanities, and biotechnology. Could you walk us through your journey and shed some light on what led you to join Infinite Roots and become a co-founder? What are the synergies and learnings from your past experiences that help you now in fulfilling your current role?
Cathy: Absolutely. My upbringing was nestled between a psychologist mother and a lawyer father — I chose to study business psychology as a kind of middle ground. It gave me a good feel for both professions while offering flexibility in shaping my future path.
During my studies, I developed a fascination with consumer behavior, particularly in how people interact with food — their shopping habits, consumption patterns, and the psychology behind their choices. Exploring food innovation, I focused on the chemistry behind food as well as the concept of flavor. This is where I first discovered the world of fermentation.
Once you dive into the world of fermentation, it’s impossible to stay just for a brief visit because it has so much to offer. Some of the most enjoyed kinds of food are fermented products, such as cheese, yogurt or bread. Fermentation allows us to transform very basic ingredients into something far more valuable and complex. That is the beauty of it: you can easily tweak this natural process by selecting the right microorganisms as well as adjusting conditions, and that leads you to a remarkable outcome. I think that is why fermentation fascinates me so much.
When I finished my studies, I was thrilled to learn where the best food products in the world are handled with the most creative input. I joined Geranium and a while later Noma’s renowned Fermentation Lab. It was an ideal blend of science and gastronomy for me. It’s not just the lab idea that works on a small scale, but it’s really something where you deliver fermentation to consumers every day and explore the boundaries. Chefs handle food with so many techniques and skills, but they rarely can put into words how they reached a certain result that touches the guest. However, I felt that there was a greater potential than just reaching a very limited group of people in the end.
I decided to leverage my experiences in a broader context. When you create a bridge from chefs to scientists — or to the startup world — all sides can benefit. Leaving Noma, I wrote a book on fermentation, where I could connect those different ecosystems and explain fermentation in a simple way, rather than as a scientific concept.
This journey brought me to Mazen and Thibault, the other co-founders from Infinite Roots, who told me about their fermentation process and how they use the power of mushrooms. I was fascinated from the get-go. The opportunity to work with a completely new material, mycelium, to develop a completely new process and create a product that could sustainably feed a lot of people is what excited me the most. Laying out the groundwork was definitely a part of it as well.
Aga: Very impressive! The entire founding team of Infinite Roots are top fermentation experts. What does collaboration among the co-founders look like?
Cathy: Each of the three of us brings unique strengths. Thibault is a scientist at heart and by passion. Being the CSO at Infinite Roots is the perfect match for him. Mazen, our CEO, is a very strong communicator. He shapes our vision and mission, and explains to the broader audience who we are, what the idea behind Infinite Roots is, and why we think it is so important. As for my role, I provide a bridge between science and the future vision. I transform our products into something more emotional, something people can taste, eat, feel, and touch — bringing them away from a purely technical environment.
Aga: Your background in consumer behavior is certainly a great aid in this! On top of what you already mentioned, what do you personally value the most in terms of their quality as people?
Cathy: The dedication and vision each member brings are invaluable. I would say there is never something too hard for Thibault to solve. He will always get to the bottom of the problem and find a solution for it. There is no limit, no hour, nothing that would stop him from reaching his goals. As for Mazen, it is definitely the vision. He is able to bring so many people into the company that share our vision and are highly motivated to reach it. This is how we were able to create a highly motivated team that truly wants to create a more sustainable food system. That motivation is clearly driven by Mazen’s visionary perspective and outstanding storytelling.
Aga: Philip (CFO) is a relatively new addition to the team. Do you collaborate closely with him? What does he bring to the blend?
Cathy: Philip is the one who creates the foundation to make sure we are not going too far off course or too deep into things. Where Thibault focuses on detail for solution planning, Mazen looks far ahead with visionary goals, and I am very pragmatic, he provides the essential structure. When Phil joined, we were a team of around 20 people. Now we are 70. So we need to make sure that there is a structure for the overall company in place, including OKRs, milestones, budgets, and goals that are aligned with what we need to achieve as a company. This is definitely Phil’s strength that he brings to us.
Aga: Reflecting on Infinite Roots’ position in the evolving food industry, what sets you apart?
Cathy: For me it is definitely the team. We have brought so many creative people together and they are all dedicated to our vision that they’re really pushing the limits. Sometimes we are so solution-oriented or focused on achieving goals that we miss celebrating what we have already achieved. We had an event where external people were saying “Wow, you were able to create these 10 products in such a short timeframe. How is that actually possible?”. I think the passion and the drive that we have is really outstanding.
From the consumer perspective, it’s the mushroom story. We are working with edible mushrooms, and I’m very convinced that this will bring the emotional storytelling to consumers that is needed to talk about how we can feed future generations. Some people might be afraid of this topic. By connecting the natural environment of mushrooms and mimicking what nature does in a controlled environment allows us to give safety and trust to our consumers.
Aga: The industries you’ve worked in were traditionally male-dominated. Do you see a shift towards greater diversity?
Cathy: The shift is happening, but very, very slowly. Of course, we have a huge debate about bringing more females into leading positions. Until society has really adapted working habits and the decision-making processes being gender neutral it will probably take at least another decade. There are so many layers to a work environment that are still driven by male concepts. For hundreds of years they were shaped by men. It will really take some time until we achieve an equal structure. My goal is not to promote a female-dominated structure but to establish a genuinely equal one. That’s why it’s important to me to serve as an example of a woman in a leadership position.
Aga: Could you share some anecdotes that illustrate the difference between a female vs male perspective? Do you see the need for a more balanced view than what we currently have?
Cathy: What is interesting in the male-dominated fine dining industry is that most of the chefs were inspired by their mothers, or at least have experienced a rather traditional household where their mother used to cook for them. So consumption and the choice of what is good for people still has a rather female connotation. Yet if you look into who is preparing the food, not only within fine dining, it’s mainly men. You will find kitchens where the cooking is very technical and a rather theoretical construct. Whenever you have kitchens with more women, I have experienced that the way of working is more balanced and harmonized, emotions are, so to say, more ‘allowed’, which you will feel in the presented dishes. And in the end, the way a dish can emotionally touch you becomes a bit more present. This is more and more important in times when we talk about dining experiences and where food plays a key role in defining identities.
At Infinite Roots, we have a good balance of men and women, and I am very happy about that. In the technical world, women are still seen as exotic and get treated a bit like that. It is not great to hear, “Oh, how nice it is to have a woman here.” People still emphasize too little why a woman got into a position, and that they have indeed worked themselves up into this role for a good reason.
Nevertheless, I see the shift towards bringing and empowering more women into key roles. If you ask me, one of the biggest implications is the father figure. We will only get into a balanced system with the father taking over a parenting role that is as important as the mother’s role. We need to change the narrative that a woman between 20 and 40 will be gone from the workplace for a few years due to motherhood. If men and women take care of their children equally, this perspective will drastically change, and we will accept as a society that the workforce within a specific age will be reduced a bit. But at the end of the day, I see that the whole of society will benefit from this balance.
Find out more on their website: https://www.infiniteroots.com/
Since our first investment in Infinite Roots (FKA Mushlabs) in 2020, we have been excited to witness and empower the company’s GameChanging mission to transform the food industry. Demonstrating a compelling tech hedge powered by data science, their robust platform matches mycelium strains and fermentation parameters to obtain the desired outputs with impressive precision.
Firm believers in the power of people and teams, we played a key role in introducing Infinite Roots’ Chairman Tim Schiffers to the team, contributed to their people and organizational development, and doubled down on our support by participating in their record-breaking Series B round earlier this year.
