Editor: Caleb Acquah (PhD)

GFI | FOOD INNOVATION & SCIENCE

Europe’s next move in food biotechnology may not be a new microorganism or protein. It may be the shared infrastructure needed to manufacture them at scale.

Key Takeaways

• The European Commission’s 8 September agri-food research and innovation strategy calls for private investment in open-access pilot and demonstration-scale fermentation infrastructure.
• It targets the “second valley of death”: the gap between pilot production and industrial scale.
• CBE JU has provided €287.8 million across 47 food and feed ingredient projects, with new demonstration projects such as PROSCALE starting this month.
• Feedstock choice is becoming a competitive variable, but side-stream and gas-based sustainability claims still have to be proven at scale.
• Infrastructure alone will not clear the path. Novel foods remain outside the strategy’s regulatory sandboxes, and demand is still uncertain.
• Timelines are long. Broader rollout of Food 2040 begins in 2028 under Horizon Europe 2028 to 2034.

From Research Policy to Industrial Policy

On 8 September, the Commission adopted a new strategic approach to agri-food research and innovation, built on two frameworks: AgRI 2040 for agriculture and rural areas, and Food 2040 for food systems [1]. It builds on the November 2025 Bioeconomy Strategy, which named advanced fermentation a lead technology, and adds a practical commitment: encouraging private investment in open-access pilot and demonstration-scale bioprocessing facilities [2][3].

The logic is straightforward. Most startups cannot finance their own scale-up plants. Shared facilities would let them test, optimize and de-risk processes before committing capital to commercial manufacturing.

The Bottleneck Has Moved Downstream

Precision and biomass fermentation have shown that microorganisms can produce proteins, fats, enzymes and other food ingredients. Producing them economically at thousands of tonnes is a different problem. Larger reactors bring challenges in oxygen transfer, mixing, heat removal, contamination control, downstream purification and batch consistency, and small shifts in productivity or recovery can decide whether an ingredient is commercially viable.

The strategy identifies this pilot-to-industrial transition as a “second valley of death” for sustainable ingredients [8].

The Money Is Moving Toward Demonstration

Public funding is already shifting toward scale. The Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) reports €287.8 million in EU funding across 47 projects developing new food and feed ingredients [4].

One of the newest, PROSCALE, started in September with about €7 million from CBE JU within a total budget of roughly €8.5 million [5][6]. It will scale continuous fermentation of fungal, yeast and bacterial single-cell proteins using food-industry side streams, including potato, wheat and vegetable residues and baking and pasta by-products, targeting ingredients above 50% protein on a dry-matter basis.

Feedstock Could Become the Next Competitive Frontier

Fermentation economics are usually discussed in terms of strains and bioreactors, but feedstock matters as much. Many processes rely on refined sugars, which at large volumes shape cost, land use and environmental footprint. Side streams and gases offer alternatives that could eventually let fermentation plants operate as integrated biorefineries, converting local carbon sources into proteins, fats and functional ingredients.

None of this is automatically sustainable. Side streams can contain compounds that inhibit microbial growth. Gas fermentation needs specialized reactors and affordable green hydrogen, and the 2025 insolvency of Austrian gas fermentation startup Arkeon showed how hard scale-up economics can be [9]. The advantage has to be demonstrated at industrial scale.

Infrastructure Is Not the Only Constraint

A 2026 study of Europe’s precision-fermentation innovation system found active startups, rising investment and growing industry participation, alongside a perceived shortage of commercial-scale capacity and regulatory and demand-side uncertainties that shape how the sector develops [7].

The new strategy only partly addresses these. It proposes regulatory sandboxes for agri-food innovations but excludes novel foods, the category most fermentation-derived ingredients fall into. GFI Europe welcomed the scale-up focus but criticized the absence of dedicated funding to improve taste, texture and cost [8].

Europe could build world-class fermentation capacity and still struggle to commercialize what comes out of it. Manufacturing, regulatory pathways, consumer acceptance and cost competitiveness have to mature together.

The significance of the EU’s latest strategy is not that fermentation has suddenly become important. It is that policymakers increasingly treat biotechnology competitiveness as an industrial ecosystem: laboratories, pilot plants, demonstration facilities, regulators and commercial manufacturing, each able to stall the whole chain. The next phase of the food biotech race may be won less by who discovers the most interesting microorganism than by who builds the infrastructure to turn biology into ingredients at industrial scale.

Related on GFI: The UK Is Building a Regulatory Playbook for the Next Generation of Food Biotechnology and Precision-Fermented Dairy Proteins Have Solved the Biology. The Race Now Is Cost.

---

Sources

1. European Commission. Commission launches new strategic approach to boost research, innovation, deployment and uptake in Europe’s agri-food sector. September 8, 2026.
2. Food Manufacture. 5 EU innovation strategies in food and agriculture. September 21, 2026.
3. European Commission. A Strategic Framework for a Competitive and Sustainable EU Bioeconomy (COM(2025) 960). November 2025.
4. Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking. Beyond the lab: scaling Europe’s bio-based food and feed innovations. September 16, 2026.
5. Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking. PROSCALE project summary. HORIZON-JU-CBE-2025.
6. Green Queen. EU Pumps €7M in Microbial Fermentation Project to Scale Up Waste-Derived Proteins. 2026.
7. Plummer P, Andersson J, Lennerfors TT. From lab to fork: Directionality in the European innovation system for precision fermentation-derived food ingredients. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. 2026;60:101108.
8. PPTI News. EU food research strategy puts fermentation scale-up and protein diversification on agenda. September 25, 2026.
9. AgFunderNews. Gas fermentation ‘protein from air’ startup Arkeon files for insolvency. 2025.