What does Auroevo do?

We are using modern breeding techniques to rapidly improve crops for agriculture.

How are you different?

1. We work with orphaned, heritage, and wild food plants that are not currently in common agricultural usage. In some cases that means reviving ancient crops, in others that means domesticating entirely new crop species from wild plants. In other cases, we are hybridizing ancient, wild, and modern plants together to produce something new.

2. Unlike many other crop development companies, we do not use genetic engineering or editing. All crops we produce will be able to be certified as organic in the United States and meet the requirements for the European Union and other regions that restrict genetically modified foods.

3. Our unique process preserves the internal genetic diversity of the species that we work with, avoiding the catastrophic genetic erosion caused by conventional breeding techniques.

Who funds your work and who owns Auroevo?

Auroevo is owned by our cofounders, Jed Wheeler and Dr. Christopher Hendrickson.

Our work thus far has been funded directly by our founders and by several grants, most notably a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the US National Science foundation.

What is your relationship with Manzanita Cooperative?

In September of 2023, our cofounders originally incorporated as a California General Cooperative under the name Manzanita Cooperative. Over the next two years, they worked on both our crop development work and a proposal around agroforestry using acorn as a grain replacement.

In June of 2025, the worker-owners of Manzanita Cooperative unanimously voted to split the company in two in order to simplify our organization and more easily procure future funding for both efforts. The agroforestry work retained the name Manzanita Cooperative and the crop development work moved to a new corporate entity under the name Auroevo. In July of 2025, this reorganization was completed.