In another life, Jake Berber was an ITA All-American & Scholar-Athlete, kicking ass in tennis courts across the United States.
There are echoes of that younger man today in his focus and determination. But Jake has left that behind. Today, he is CEO and Co-Founder of Prefer, a startup that has innovated a way of creating bean-free coffee through fermentation, with the ultimate goal of making the coffee industry more sustainable by easing the demands on growers and producers and extending the lifecycles of commonly consumed foods such as bread and grain.
This isn’t the Texas native’s first foray into sustainable foodtech. While doing his MBA in Entrepreneurship in Tel Aviv University, he also spent a year in 2021 serving as an Investment Analyst at Israeli venture capitalism firm Good Seed Ventures, which specialises in sustainable food startups. “I got to speak to amazing food technology founders about their amazing technology, and that was a great way for me to gather information,” he recalls, “It helped me create my thesis, and it ended up being about coffee.”
But the call to make the world a better place came even earlier than that. “It comes from following curiousities and always wanting to work on the world’s biggest problems. That’s my main motivator,” says Jake. It goes back to his days as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College in California, where he was studying neuroscience from 2017 to 2020. “I believed that mental health issues are the biggest problem faced by my generation. So I dove into neuroscience with the goal of developing alternative forms of therapy for mental health issues.”
While working in research around mental health for biotech companies, he started learning more about climate change. The scale and scope of the problem led him to realise that climate change is the biggest problem of his generation. It was such a large, complex problem for one man to solve, so Jake focussed on food.
He says, “I learned that agriculture is very carbon intensive – it is one of the most carbon intensive industries contributing to climate change. And then within that is coffee, which is a very carbon-intensive crop.”
He doesn’t intend to stop there. Prefer’s proprietary technology and fermentation process can be repeated for other foodcrops. “There are many crops that are being threatened by climate change,” Jake tells us. “Coffee being one, but also cacao, hazelnut, vanilla, citrus. Unfortunately, the list of crops affected by climate change goes on and on. Our mission at Prefer is to future-proof these food and beverages that we know and love.”
It is reported that 50% of land currently being used for coffee will no longer be arable in the coming decades if nothing is done to fight climate change. The task before Jake Berber is huge, and there aren’t enough entrepreneurs like him who put innovation and sustainability at the core of their businesses.
When we ask him if the task ahead gets too much, he replies, “I don’t feel overwhelmed. I would be overwhelmed if I wasn’t doing something about it. My personal philosophy in life is if I get worried about something, I do something about it. If I can’t do something about it, then I stop worrying. If I wasn’t working on climate change, I would be anxious about it. But I’m feeling quite good about the path I’m on. I know I’m doing my best to do my part in solving this problem.”
