IN Brief:
- Ferm Labs has secured €3 million to increase fermentation capacity at its South Tyrol operation.
- Its platform uses non-GMO microorganisms and side streams to manufacture concentrated natural flavour ingredients.
- Funding will also expand European B2B sales and R&D beyond the company’s initial cheese application.
Ferm Labs has secured €3 million to expand fermentation capacity in South Tyrol and move its first commercial flavour ingredient into wider European food manufacturing.
The seed round was led by CDP Venture Capital through its Green Transition Fund, with participation from Fund F, Redstone in collaboration with Euregio+, Alpine VC, and confectionery manufacturer Loacker Group. Ferm Labs is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, with production and research activities in South Tyrol, Italy.
Founded in 2025 by Stephanie Lüpold and Mattia Baroni, the company has developed a non-GMO microbial fermentation platform for producing concentrated flavour ingredients from low-value side streams. Ferm Labs says its process can shorten fermentation steps that might conventionally take weeks to a matter of hours by controlling the operating conditions more tightly.
Its first commercial product is Kokumesan, a milk-based flavour ingredient aimed at cheese applications. Supplied as stable pastes and powders, it is designed to build mature cheese flavour while reducing the quantity of conventional cheese required in selected formulations.
The company claims Kokumesan can reduce raw cheese inclusion from around 20% to below 1% in some products, with cost-in-use savings of up to 75%. Those figures will ultimately depend on the application, because cheese contributes fat, protein, salt, solids, colour, texture, and processing behaviour as well as flavour.
A concentrated flavour system can therefore reduce the amount of cheese needed for sensory impact without replacing all of its functional contribution. Sauces, fillings, snacks, bakery products, and prepared foods may still require reformulation around body, emulsification, moisture, melt, and stability when cheese content is reduced substantially.
The new funding will be directed first towards additional bioprocessing capacity in South Tyrol. Ferm Labs also plans to expand its European B2B sales team and add research staff as it develops ingredients for categories beyond cheese flavouring.
That combination of manufacturing and technical support is important in an ingredient scale-up. Customers need more than samples: they require specifications, application guidance, regulatory documentation, shelf-life data, quality assurance, and enough technical support to qualify the material on existing production equipment.
Fermentation scale itself presents another set of constraints. Larger batches increase the importance of temperature control, pH, oxygen transfer, nutrient availability, contamination prevention, downstream separation, and cleaning. A process can look efficient in development work and lose much of that advantage if yields become less predictable or cleaning and recovery steps restrict throughput.
The platform also has to prove that its use of side streams does not introduce unnecessary variability. Feedstock composition can shift between suppliers or seasons, while the fermentation step needs a sufficiently consistent nutrient profile to maintain predictable productivity. Standardising incoming material, or designing the process to tolerate wider variation, will affect both yield and the amount of analytical control required around each batch.
Recent research has shown how broadly fermentation can alter ingredient performance. Fungal fermentation of pea flour, for example, has been shown to reduce starch and antinutritional compounds while increasing measured protein yield. Ferm Labs is applying the same broad principle of controlled biological processing to flavour, rather than protein concentration.
Its use of non-GMO microorganisms may also simplify commercial discussions with customers that remain cautious about genetically engineered production strains. That does not remove the need for regulatory review, ingredient declarations, allergen assessment, and process validation, but it can alter the route through customer approval.
Ferm Labs is positioning its ingredients around flavour enhancement as well as salt and sugar reduction, which broadens the potential application base beyond cheese. That breadth creates opportunity, but it also raises the qualification burden: performance in a savoury sauce, snack seasoning, frozen meal, or beverage cannot be assumed from results in a cheese system.
Loacker Group’s participation gives the funding round a direct food-manufacturing connection alongside institutional and venture investors. No supply agreement has been announced, so the investment should not be treated as evidence of commercial adoption by Loacker, but an established manufacturer can bring practical application and scale-up knowledge into the investor base.
The central question is whether Ferm Labs can reproduce its claimed speed and yield at higher throughput while maintaining flavour consistency and microbiological control. Industrial customers will expect the same performance across successive batches, including handling properties, storage stability, and behaviour through heating, cooling, pumping, and filling.
The €3 million round gives the company additional capacity to test that transition. If the South Tyrol expansion delivers repeatable production economics, Ferm Labs will have a stronger basis for moving from a single cheese-flavour application into a broader portfolio of fermentation-derived ingredients.
