IN Brief:
- MAASH has assembled €12.15 million of equity, public support, and debt for its French industrialisation programme.
- A 12 m³ demonstration plant at Carling-Saint-Avold will generate scale-up data and larger quantities of LoCylia mycoprotein.
- The company is preparing for a subsequent production stage targeting up to 10,000 tonnes annually.
MAASH has secured €12.15 million to advance industrial production of its LoCylia mycoprotein, combining new equity with public financing and debt. The package will support a 12 m³ demonstration plant at Carling-Saint-Avold in France and preparation for a later production stage targeting 10,000 tonnes a year.
The financing comprises €5.85 million of equity from Ambra Capital, InvestPro, Bpifrance Amorçage Industriel, Nordzucker, and Tereos, together with €4.3 million from Bpifrance’s Première Usine programme and a €2 million Bpifrance loan. The mix gives MAASH capital for the physical scale-up work that begins once laboratory and pilot results have to be converted into larger vessels, utilities, downstream equipment, food-safety controls, and repeatable operating procedures.
MAASH already operates an industrial site at Carling-Saint-Avold on the Chemesis platform. Its LoCylia ingredient is produced through submerged fermentation using filamentous fungi, with temperature, pH, and oxygen supply controlled through the process before the fungal biomass is treated into a food ingredient. The company is developing the protein for B2B formulation, including hybrid meat products and fully vegetarian or vegan applications.
The 12 m³ demonstration plant provides an intermediate step between pilot work and full industrial output. It should generate larger quantities for customer trials while giving engineers process data at a scale where mixing, oxygen transfer, heat removal, contamination control, and downstream loading begin to resemble commercial manufacturing more closely.
Fermentation scale-up is rarely a simple multiplication of vessel volume. A process that performs consistently in a small fermenter can behave differently when broth depth, agitation, gas transfer, heat removal, and cleaning requirements change. The economic effect is equally important: poor productivity or long turnaround times can leave expensive equipment underused, while weak downstream recovery can erase gains achieved during fermentation.
MAASH’s use of an existing industrial base reduces some of the infrastructure burden, but the plant still has to be configured around the organism, feedstock, hygiene regime, and product specification. Utilities, clean-in-place systems, air handling, transfer lines, separation, treatment, and finished-product handling must operate as one process rather than as independent pieces of equipment.
The company’s emphasis on hybrid products gives the scale-up a practical route into food manufacturing. Replacing part of the animal protein in an established formulation can allow product developers to test texture, flavour, nutrition, processing behaviour, and consumer acceptance without relying on a completely new product architecture. It also creates a route to volume if the ingredient can be supplied at a price compatible with mainstream manufacturing.
Recent fermentation projects show how quickly the discussion is moving from laboratory capability to industrial economics. dsm-firmenich is preparing a 120,000-litre run of its Protopia yeast protein after work at 15,000 litres, with downstream handling, contamination control, and process transfer forming part of the scale test. MAASH is approaching the same problem from a different fungal platform and a dedicated French site.
The financing also accompanies a management change. Samah Garringer is due to join as chief executive in September 2026, while co-founder Gaspard Gilbert moves into a chief commercial officer role and acts as chief financial officer. That structure places customer development, financing, and plant scale-up in parallel rather than treating the demonstration facility as a research project detached from sales.
Commercial qualification will be the harder part of the next phase. Food companies need enough material to run factory trials, but they also need specification consistency, traceability, regulatory status, shelf-life data, and assurance that supply will continue once a product has been launched. A demonstration plant can answer some of those questions only if it produces repeated batches rather than occasional development material.
The planned 10,000-tonne annual stage raises the bar again. Reaching that output requires much more than a larger fermenter: feedstock procurement, utilities, labour, quality systems, downstream capacity, packaging, warehousing, and customer demand all have to scale together. Underutilised fermentation assets can become expensive quickly, so commercial commitments will need to develop alongside the engineering work.
The immediate production milestone is the 12 m³ unit. It has to show that LoCylia can be manufactured repeatedly at greater volume without losing process stability or functional quality, providing the operating data needed to judge whether the proposed 10,000-tonne stage is a credible manufacturing project rather than a capacity target on paper.
