Europe is expanding the ways it produces food protein. The decisive industrial questions concern usable ingredients, reliable production and the cost of turning biological potential into food people choose to buy.
Europe’s alternative protein sector is reaching an important industrial milestone. In September 2026, the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking reported that the PLENITUDE mycoprotein facility in Sas van Gent, the Netherlands, was operational and had made its first commercial supply in 2025. Its potential capacity is 10,000 tonnes a year. That establishes a route into commercial production, although capacity alone does not show how much product a plant sells.
The distinction matters for a sector often discussed through factory announcements and ambitious forecasts. An ingredient must be produced consistently, perform in a recipe, meet relevant safety requirements and reach a buyer at an acceptable price. These conditions connect biology with engineering and food manufacturing. They also explain why a larger fermentation vessel, by itself, cannot settle the question of competitiveness.
Different proteins require different industrial systems
Alternative proteins encompass several distinct production routes. Plant ingredients can be concentrated from crops through physical separation or extracted using water and further purification. Biomass fermentation grows microorganisms whose biomass becomes a food ingredient. Precision fermentation uses microorganisms to make particular substances, which are recovered from the production process. Cultivating animal cells is another route, with different biological and processing requirements. EFSA distinguishes these technologies when discussing emerging foods and their assessment.
These distinctions help clarify what a manufacturer is buying. A fungal ingredient containing protein and other components is different from an isolated protein selected for a specific functional property. Comparing both only by their price per tonne can obscure differences in concentration, handling and performance. A useful comparison would ask what quantity is needed in the finished recipe, what other ingredients it replaces and how it changes processing.
VTT’s guide for food companies identifies taste, texture, production cost and nutritional value among recurring development concerns. It describes protein modification and fat selection as connected parts of the sensory challenge. For ingredient suppliers, this means that a commercial proposition needs to extend beyond protein content into the behaviour of a complete food product.
Protein purity is an engineering choice
Processing plants can pursue higher protein concentrations through different routes, each with consequences for the resulting ingredient. Research into dry fractionation of faba beans examines milling and air classification, which separate material according to its physical properties. The study contrasts this approach with wet extraction, which can achieve high purity but requires water and subsequent processing. Dry separation offers a route to concentrates while retaining more of the original material.
The relevant industrial question is therefore whether a particular application needs the additional purification. A bread ingredient and a beverage ingredient may require different combinations of solubility, flavour, colour and texture. Selecting a process against those requirements could avoid paying for a specification that adds little value to the final food. Conversely, a less purified fraction is not automatically suitable simply because its production involves fewer steps.
This suggests a more informative way to report progress: connect separation yield and resource use with a demonstrated food application. A result expressed only as protein percentage leaves open how much raw material was needed, what happened to the remaining fractions and whether the ingredient worked in a realistic recipe. Those questions also help prevent resource efficiency being confused with purity.
Industrial integration can change the production equation
PLENITUDE integrates aerobic fermentation with an existing biorefinery. Its project reporting documents completion of construction, engineering handover and initial manufacture, alongside commissioning delays and continuing optimisation of production rates. This is valuable industrial evidence because it records the work between constructing a facility and running it reliably. The reporting period ends in March 2024, so it should be read alongside the later commercial-supply update.
The project also brought together production, ingredient application and research partners. Its work included characterising the material and examining extrusion, storage and digestibility. These activities show why manufacturing a biomass is only part of developing a saleable ingredient: downstream users need evidence about what happens when it enters their own processes.
For future plants, the useful evidence would include sustained output, saleable yield, energy requirements and consistency between batches. Reporting these measures alongside utilisation would make capacity announcements more informative. An integrated site may offer practical advantages, but the size of those advantages needs to be established from operating data and the particular services shared.
Food processing residues offer possibilities and constraints
A newer project, PROSCALE, began in September 2026 with a four-year programme to develop continuous fermentation of fungal, yeast and bacterial proteins. It plans to use food-industry streams including residues from potato, wheat and vegetable processing and by-products from baking and pasta production. Its proposed system combines fermentation and downstream processing with digital modelling. These are development objectives, not evidence of completed commercial performance.
The significance lies in designing the ingredient and its feedstock supply together. A residue is useful only if it can be collected and processed in a form suited to production. For a future commercial assessment, consistency, availability and preparation requirements would need to be considered alongside purchase price. Calling a material a by-product does not establish that its use is inexpensive or environmentally preferable.
GreenProtein explored another route, extracting food-grade RuBisCO from vegetable-processing remnants. Its completed project provides a reference for recovering a functional plant protein without first growing a new microbial biomass. The project’s objectives included applications based on gelling, foaming and emulsification. Its published targets should be distinguished from independently verified operating results.
Novel food status depends on the product
The commercial and regulatory categories do not align neatly. ‘Alternative protein’ describes a broad market and research field; it does not determine whether an ingredient is legally a novel food. The European Commission defines novel food around the absence of significant human consumption in the EU before 15 May 1997, within the categories established by the legislation. New sources or production processes can therefore matter as well as the name of the protein. Commission novel-food explanation
EFSA’s application guidance sets out evidence requirements covering the production process and characterisation of the proposed food, with further guidance relevant to microorganisms. EFSA assesses safety; marketing authorisation is a separate regulatory decision. Its pre-submission services can help applicants clarify the evidence expected. Neither a successful pilot nor a positive commercial response replaces the applicable authorisation process.
For a developer, that makes the proposed production specification important early in the programme. Questions about composition, intended uses and process control need to be connected with the material actually intended for sale. Readers should also distinguish safety assessment from a claim of superior nutrition or environmental performance: each requires evidence addressing a different question.
The meaningful comparison is the food delivered
The emerging industrial picture is more diverse than a contest between animal protein and a single replacement technology. Plants, microbial biomass and precisely produced ingredients offer different combinations of functionality and manufacturing requirements. Their prospects will depend partly on matching those properties to products that customers want, rather than expecting every route to serve every application.
A practical evaluation would follow a defined quantity of finished food through the production system. It would record ingredient requirements, processing losses, energy and water use, storage needs and the nutritional role of the resulting product. Comparing equivalent uses would make the analysis more useful to manufacturers than an isolated headline about the performance of a fermenter or the purity of a powder.
Europe now has examples of commercial supply alongside projects exploring new feedstocks and processes. The next industrial evidence should explain what happens after the first delivery: whether buyers reorder, whether quality remains consistent and whether production economics hold as output rises. Those answers would reveal which protein innovations are becoming dependable parts of the food supply.
