IN Brief:
- Invest-NL estimates Dutch agrifood biotech could generate around €17bn in additional annual turnover by 2040 under a conditional scenario.
- Fermentation ingredient businesses face authorisation delays and first commercial plants costing tens or hundreds of millions of euros.
- The report recommends financing mechanisms, suitable regulatory pathways and earlier customer involvement to enable industrial scale-up.
Invest-NL has identified industrial financing and authorisation delays as major barriers preventing Dutch agrifood biotechnology companies from expanding into commercial production. Its new assessment covers fermentation-derived ingredients alongside seed genetics and biological agricultural inputs, using interviews with more than 150 entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and policymakers, supported by fifteen years of investment data. The findings place particular emphasis on the difficulty of funding a first manufacturing facility.
The Netherlands combines established food-industry customers, biotechnology research and ingredient developers, yet the period between laboratory validation and commercial manufacture remains difficult to finance. A fermentation-derived ingredient can have an identified use and a technically promising process while still lacking authorisation, a production facility and firm industrial purchasing commitments. Each gap affects whether private finance can be raised for the first full-size plant, where capital is committed before sustained sales begin.
Invest-NL estimates that a first industrial facility for a new food ingredient can cost tens or hundreds of millions of euros. Equipment, site services, manufacturing staff and downstream recovery must be paid for before a stable commercial output is established. Conventional investment programmes can be inaccessible to businesses that are expected to remain loss-making through lengthy development and approval periods. A first plant also has no comparable operating history from which financiers can confidently assess achievable utilisation or production cost.
At larger fermentation scale, feedstock preparation and sterilisation must be integrated with control of the production organism, temperature, aeration and other operating conditions appropriate to the process. The resulting ingredient then has to be recovered and made to a consistent specification through downstream processing and quality control. These are established classes of engineering work, rather than equipment details disclosed for any particular Dutch project. Their combined costs help explain why laboratory performance alone cannot demonstrate the economics of continuous industrial supply.
European market authorisation can extend the period before new food ingredients generate revenue. Invest-NL reports that approval for fermentation-derived ingredients can take one to three years longer in Europe than in the United States. Developers still have to substantiate product safety under the applicable rules, while potential factory investors must allow for the timing of that process. The report recommends more suitable regulatory pathways and testing access rather than reduced safety requirements.
For new food ingredients, including fermentation-derived proteins, Invest-NL’s scenario analysis projects approximately €8 billion of annual Dutch revenue by 2040 if financing, regulatory and market-access conditions improve. Under a scenario with no policy change, the comparable figure is approximately €2 billion. Neither figure is a forecast of orders already contracted, and both depend on the stated assumptions about commercial scale-up. The difference illustrates the institution’s estimate of the economic activity potentially delayed or lost when first-factory projects cannot proceed.
Across all three agrifood biotechnology value chains, the institution calculates a potential increase of around €17 billion in annual Dutch turnover by 2040 under favourable conditions. That broader estimate covers more than food ingredient manufacturing, so it cannot be attributed entirely to precision fermentation or other protein technologies. The assessment examines six enabling factors for each value chain: demand, infrastructure, skills, capital, regulation and collaboration. Weakness in one can prevent a technically promising process from reaching commercial output.
Biological crop protection faces another regulatory constraint in the same assessment, with some European authorisation processes taking eight to ten years. Invest-NL says this encourages certain developers to pursue initial market access in Brazil or the United States. Crop protection belongs to a separate agrifood biotechnology value chain from novel food ingredients, so that approval duration does not describe the food ingredient process. It does, however, illustrate how authorisation times affect where technology companies seek their first customers and investments.
Corjan van den Berg, co-founder of yeast protein producer Revyve, has called for loans, guarantees and grants alongside private investment to finance the move to commercial-scale output. Invest-NL recommends sharing early manufacturing risk through public capital, improving access to test facilities and engaging industrial customers sooner. Potential buyers can help establish specifications, performance requirements and indicative volumes before a production site is designed, while any binding offtake would require a separate commercial commitment.
Invest-NL also accepts that not every resulting product needs to be manufactured inside the Netherlands. Its proposed policy approach aims to retain research, company development and strategic parts of the value chain while enabling viable production routes elsewhere when appropriate. The assessment draws on interviews with more than 150 participants and investment data covering 2010 to April 2026, with support from the InvestEU Advisory Hub. Its recommendations centre on the combined availability of finance, approval routes, infrastructure and customers at the point when an ingredient business must commit to an industrial plant.
