IN Brief:
- CBE JU has provided €287.8 million to 47 food and feed projects representing €409.5 million with industrial contributions included.
- Nearly 60% of the portfolio consists of demonstration or flagship actions focused on pilot or industrial-scale deployment.
- Projects cover fermentation proteins, plant extracts, side-stream recovery and first-of-a-kind production infrastructure.
Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking has committed €287.8 million of EU funding across 47 food and feed projects as more of its bio-based technology portfolio moves from laboratory development towards pilot and industrial production.
Industrial contributions take combined investment across the projects to €409.5 million. Nearly 60% are classed as demonstration or flagship actions, placing much of the programme beyond early research and into the more difficult stages of proving production performance, costs and product consistency at larger scale.
The portfolio reports 131 products with potential food and feed applications. These comprise 102 ingredients — 60 for food and 42 for feed — together with 29 bio-based chemicals that could be used within the same markets.
Technologies range from fermentation and mycelium production to extraction of proteins and functional compounds from crop residues, grass, aquatic biomass and food-industry side streams. Several projects are building demonstration facilities or adapting existing industrial assets rather than restricting development to laboratory equipment.
PLENITUDE is among the more advanced examples. The project established commercial-scale mycoprotein production at Sas van Gent in the Netherlands, integrating aerobic fermentation with an existing biorefinery. The plant has potential annual capacity of 10,000 tonnes and began commercial supply during 2025.
MycoStruct is working at a different point in the scale-up curve, targeting a 5,000-litre demonstration facility for structured mycelium ingredients with projected annual output of 25 tonnes. PROSCALE is developing continuous fermentation using food-industry side streams as feedstock for single-cell proteins.
SUSTAINEXT in Spain uses another process route. An existing facility in Extremadura is being adapted into a multiproduct biorefinery intended to handle around 20,000 tonnes of locally sourced biomass each year, including rosemary, camomile, lemon verbena and side streams from crops such as olives and pomegranates.
Each project encounters a similar industrial constraint as production rises. Processes that perform predictably in laboratory vessels can behave differently when volumes increase, changing heat transfer, mixing, contamination risk, separation efficiency, energy demand and cleaning requirements.
Fermentation illustrates the problem clearly. Increasing vessel size affects oxygen transfer, temperature control, agitation and process timing, while downstream separation, concentration and drying can consume more capital and energy than the biological stage itself.
Plant-derived ingredients face their own scale constraints. Feedstocks vary by harvest, geography and storage condition, and extraction economics can depend on maintaining sufficient volumes of material that would otherwise be treated as low-value side streams or waste.
European protein investment has increasingly concentrated on scale-up infrastructure as companies move beyond proving that a microorganism or crop fraction can produce a useful ingredient. Capital is now being directed towards fermenters, downstream separation, purification, drying, utilities and the production evidence needed for customer qualification.
Recent plant-ingredient programmes have followed a similar route, concentrating on process efficiency and industrial economics rather than treating laboratory functionality as sufficient evidence for commercial production.
Demonstration plants allow those assumptions to be tested before full-scale investment. Operators can measure yield, downtime, cleaning frequency, utility consumption, labour requirements and raw-material variability while producing enough ingredient for customers to run meaningful application trials.
The resulting data is also central to financing decisions. A process can produce technically attractive material while remaining commercially weak if purification, concentration or drying costs are excessive, if raw-material collection is unreliable or if customers cannot absorb the planned output.
CBE JU projects are also addressing access to physical infrastructure. Some are constructing dedicated demonstration units, while others use shared or existing industrial plants, reducing the amount of capital that early-stage businesses must commit before market demand has been established.
Regulatory qualification remains another constraint. Novel ingredients may require safety, compositional and process evidence before they can be sold widely, while feed products operate under separate regulatory frameworks. Demonstration facilities therefore have to produce repeatable material and defensible process data rather than simply larger batches.
The breadth of the portfolio extends beyond high-profile meat and dairy alternatives. Functional extracts, recovered fibres, feed ingredients, algae products and materials derived from food-processing residues can all use fermentation, separation or biorefinery infrastructure developed through the programme.
The commercial test begins after grant-backed milestones are reached. Facilities need dependable feedstocks, repeat customers and operating margins capable of supporting production without continuing development funding. With almost three fifths of the CBE JU food and feed portfolio now concentrated in demonstration and flagship actions, more of those technologies are entering the stage where industrial performance can be measured in tonnes, utilisation and manufacturing cost rather than laboratory yield.
