The standard account of why alternative proteins do not scale runs like this: buyers will not commit until the price falls, the price will not fall until volume rises, volume will not rise until someone finances a plant, and nobody finances a plant without committed demand. GFI Europe calls it a commitment standoff. It is a good description of a real problem.
It is also incomplete, and one disclosure shows why. In June 2024 The Better Meat Co told AgFunderNews it held “multiple signed letters of intent and offtake agreements currently representing demand for 33 tons of dry mycoprotein per month—the equivalent of 99 tons when hydrated—from our joint development agreement partners,” and that those agreements came from “some of the biggest CPG brands on the planet in the US and in Asia.”
In the same interview, the company said it was “unable to commercially supply major CPG brands until we scale up,” having raised $27 million and needing a further influx of capital to manufacture at meaningful scale.
So the demand signal existed, was signed, came from named-calibre buyers, and did not unlock the capital. That is not a chicken-and-egg problem. That is a statement about what these commitments are worth.
Methodology note
Everything below is drawn from company disclosures made to trade press, and from GFI Europe’s framework piece. Three limits matter.
First, the disclosures are of different vintages: The Better Meat Co’s figures are from June 2024, ENOUGH’s from August 2023 and February 2024, Enifer’s from March 2026. We have dated every claim rather than presenting them as a snapshot.
Second, “offtake agreement” is not a defined term. It is used in these disclosures to cover instruments ranging from a letter of intent to a binding take-or-pay contract, and none of the underlying contracts is public.
Third — and this is the finding that most affects anyone trying to compare these companies — the tonnages are not stated on a common basis. We return to that below.
The pyramid nobody publishes their position on
GFI Europe’s piece points to a useful framework from the climate-focused VC firm Extantia, the “Maslow Pyramid of Offtakes.” It orders buyer commitment from soft signals — letters of intent, memoranda of understanding — through conditional arrangements to binding, long-term contracts.
The practical value of that ordering is that it makes the announcements comparable. The practical problem is that companies announce the word “offtake” without announcing their position on the pyramid, and press coverage rarely presses for it.
GFI Europe is explicit about the risk. It recommends startups pursue “over-collateralisation” — securing more commitments than needed, on the expectation that some will not materialise. And it notes that even hard commitments carry limited practical protection: if large companies breach take-or-pay contracts, startups often have little recourse.
That advice is not written for a market where offtake means what it means in energy or mining.
Practical consequence: when you read that a fermentation company has “signed offtake agreements,” the useful question is not the tonnage. It is whether the counterparty has paid anything, and what happens if they walk. The Better Meat Co disclosure is unusually honest on this — it describes joint development partners paying monthly fees for 25 or 50 kilos a month of sample material, and says those arrangements in turn led to the offtake agreements. Those are real commercial relationships. They are not project finance.
Why food is structurally worse at this than energy
GFI Europe identifies two reasons the offtake playbook that built solar does not transfer.
The first is functional differentiation. Electricity is a commodity; electrons are electrons. Food is not. GFI Europe’s own example is precise: a precision-fermentation egg protein “might whip well enough for a cake but not bind effectively for a pasta dough.” The buyer of an animal egg knows its behaviour across every application. The buyer of a replacement is underwriting performance risk per application, which is a different underwriting question and a slower one. This is the same constraint we examined in what actually changes when you formulate with fermentation-derived protein.
The second is market structure, and it is the more important of the two. Energy and mining rely on a few centralised offtakers. Food ingredients move through what GFI Europe calls “merchant offtake” — dozens or hundreds of buyers each taking small volumes. There is no utility to sign a power purchase agreement with. The anchor commitment that would justify a plant does not exist as a market structure, so it has to be manufactured deal by deal.
Practical consequence: a fermentation company modelling its route to market on a single anchor customer is modelling a market structure that food does not have. Either the anchor has to be created — which means giving something up — or the plant has to be financed against a book of small commitments, which lenders price accordingly.
Three companies, three positions
Here is what the biomass fermentation players have actually disclosed. The gaps in this table are as informative as the entries.
| The Better Meat Co | ENOUGH | Enifer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ingredient / organism | Rhiza, from Neurospora species | ABUNDA, from Fusarium venenatum | Pekilo, from Paecilomyces |
| Demand disclosed | LOIs and offtake agreements for 33 t dry/month (≈99 t hydrated), Jun 2024 | Commercial offtake agreements with Cargill, volume undisclosed; customers include Unilever, Plukon Food Group, suppliers to M&S | None disclosed; FDA GRAS notification filed Mar 2026 explicitly to unlock supply discussions |
| Production capacity disclosed | 9,000-litre bioreactor, 100+ harvests, demo scale (Jun 2024) | One line at 10,000 t/yr, funding secured to double to 20,000 t; site ceiling stated as 60,000 t (Aug 2023) | Pilot line at 5–10 kg/day, with contract-manufacturer campaigns at ~10× that; €33m plant for 3,000 t/yr under construction (Mar 2026) |
| Capital raised | $27m (Jun 2024) | €95m / $103.3m cumulative (Aug 2023), plus an undisclosed Cargill top-up for a single-digit minority stake (Feb 2024) | ~€49m equity and debt; Series C in progress (Mar 2026) |
| Position | Demand ahead of capacity | Capacity and demand co-financed by the same counterparty | Regulatory clearance ahead of both |
Read across the “demand disclosed” row and the asymmetry is obvious. The company with the most specific, most quotable demand book is the one furthest from being able to serve it. The company that never published a tonnage is the one with 10,000 tonnes a year installed.
The Better Meat Co: demand first
The Sacramento company’s technical position is genuinely strong. It moved to a continuous process — feedstock added and product harvested continuously — which its cofounder Paul Shapiro described as “the holy grail for fermentation,” and claimed at the time that to their knowledge nobody aside from Quorn was running continuous biomass fermentation in mycoprotein. Continuous R&D delivered a stated at-scale cost reduction of more than 30% and 68% more mycelium in the same time compared with a year earlier, and the company projected that at scale its mycoprotein could compete on cost with commodity beef.
Its GRAS notice filed with the FDA in late 2022 puts Rhiza at 45–50% crude protein by dry weight with a PDCAAS of 0.87–0.96 — close to casein and egg. The product ships ambient as 5–50 mm dehydrated dices and is rehydrated at the customer’s facility, which removes a cold-chain cost most alt-protein ingredients carry.
None of that produced a plant. The constraint was capital, and 33 tonnes a month of signed-but-unbinding demand did not supply it.
ENOUGH: the buyer becomes the landlord and the investor
ENOUGH solved the problem by collapsing three relationships into one counterparty.
Its Sas van Gent facility in the Netherlands is co-located with a Cargill starch plant that supplies its fermentable sugars, and it returns sugary wastewater to Cargill’s bioethanol facility next door in a zero-waste loop. In February 2024 Cargill invested an undisclosed sum as a top-up to ENOUGH’s €40m ($43.6m) Series C — taking, per CEO Jim Laird, “a minority single digit holding” — and signed commercial offtake agreements to use and market ABUNDA, with Cargill also acting as a reseller into customer relationships ENOUGH could not reach alone.
GFI Europe cites exactly this arrangement as its worked example of a channel partnership, and the structure is the point: Cargill is simultaneously the feedstock supplier, the site neighbour, an equity holder and a route to market. Demand risk did not get transferred so much as dissolved into a relationship where the counterparty had four reasons to want the plant to run.
The cost is obvious and worth stating plainly. ENOUGH gave up equity and a substantial share of its route to market to get here. Laird was clear that ENOUGH continues to deal directly with its major target channels, but the dependency is real. This is not a free solution; it is a priced one.
Scale context matters too. Laird put ENOUGH’s 20,000 tonnes against roughly 20 million tonnes of poultry produced in the European market — “a drop in the ocean.” Even the best-capitalised position in this table is a rounding error against the incumbent category.
Enifer: clearance before commitment
Enifer, a VTT spin-out in Finland, is running the third strategy: remove the buyer’s internal blocker first.
In March 2026 it filed a GRAS notification with the FDA for Pekilo, having previously self-affirmed GRAS the preceding September. The stated reason is procurement, not safety. Elisa Arte, the company’s head of food R&D, put it directly. “Large food manufacturers operate within strict procurement and compliance frameworks,” she said, and “FDA-notified GRAS status removes a key internal barrier, allowing ingredient discussions to move beyond technical sampling into long-term supply planning.”
That is the clearest public statement we have seen of the mechanism connecting regulatory status to offtake. It is not that an unapproved ingredient cannot be bought. It is that a large manufacturer’s procurement function cannot process it. The regulatory filing is a sales operation.
The timing is awkward, though, and Enifer has said so. Self-affirmed GRAS requires no FDA review, and the FDA evaluates only around 75 GRAS notices a year, each taking six to twelve months. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has proposed ending the self-affirmation route, which Enifer co-founder and CEO Simo Ellilä has publicly opposed: “Self-GRAS is not a loophole; it is an essential part of how credible research moves from the lab to the marketplace.” The company has chosen to enter formal review anyway — because the procurement barrier is worth more to it than the speed.
Enifer has also applied for novel food approval in the EU, Singapore and the UK. Our count of FDA GRAS clearances for fermentation-derived protein tracks the same pathway on the precision-fermentation side.
Practical consequence: if you are pricing a fermentation company, the regulatory filing date is a leading indicator of when serious procurement conversations can start, not merely of when the product becomes legal. The gap between those two things is routinely six to twelve months.
The unit problem
There is a specific, checkable reason the table above cannot be turned into a market share estimate.
The Better Meat Co’s demand book is stated in dry tonnes, with the hydrated equivalent given alongside: 33 tonnes dry, 99 tonnes hydrated. ENOUGH’s capacity is stated as “10,000 tons a year” with no basis specified in any source we read. Enifer’s plant is stated as 3,000 tonnes annually of “the protein,” also without a stated basis — and its pilot output is quoted in kilograms per day, a third unit.
On the most favourable reading, The Better Meat Co’s entire secured demand book — 33 tonnes dry a month, roughly 396 tonnes a year — is about 4% of one ENOUGH production line. On a hydrated basis it is closer to 12%. Which of those is right depends on a disclosure none of these companies makes.
This is the same disclosure gap we found on cost, where four public techno-economic models for precision-fermented protein span under $20/kg to $15,000/kg with nothing in the band where the industry actually operates. The category has a measurement problem before it has an economics problem.
Practical consequence: when evaluating a supply agreement, specify the moisture basis in the contract and in any public statement. Any tonnage figure that does not state dry or hydrated is not a number, and a buyer comparing two suppliers on unstated bases is comparing nothing.
The counter-argument
The case against this analysis is that offtake is not really the constraint — capital is, and offtake is a symptom.
It has evidence behind it. VC funding for the category contracted sharply, and companies with approval and capital have still failed: Believer Meats cleared both FDA and USDA and shut down anyway. On that reading, a plant gets built when an investor believes the unit economics, and a book of LOIs is decoration.
There is also a version of the buyer’s case worth stating fairly. A procurement director declining to sign a binding multi-year contract for an ingredient that is not yet produced at scale, whose functional performance varies by application, and whose supplier may not exist in three years, is not being timid. They are correctly pricing supply risk. The demand standoff is not a failure of nerve; it is two parties each accurately assessing that the other might not deliver.
The rebuttal is ENOUGH. Cargill did not sign a conventional offtake contract either — it took equity, supplied feedstock, took the site next door and became a reseller. That is what it cost to make the demand signal financeable. The lesson is not that buyers should be braver. It is that in a merchant-offtake market, a contract alone is not a sufficient instrument, and companies waiting for one are waiting for something the market structure does not produce.
GFI Europe’s structural suggestions — volume guarantees on the Clinton Health Access Initiative model, advance market commitments on the Frontier model, institutional foodservice as an anchor buyer, public procurement on the model of NASA’s semiconductor purchases — all point the same way. Each replaces the missing centralised offtaker with a constructed one.
What we could not establish
- Whether any of these commitments are binding. No underlying contract is public. The Better Meat Co’s disclosure groups “letters of intent and offtake agreements” into a single figure without splitting them, so the 33-tonne number cannot be decomposed.
- The counterparties. The Better Meat Co described “some of the biggest CPG brands on the planet in the US and in Asia” without naming any. We did not confirm any of them.
- Whether ENOUGH’s capacity doubling completed. In August 2023 Laird said installing the second line would take 18 months; in February 2024 the company was described as “currently working to double production capacity.” We found no source confirming completion, and the 20,000-tonne figure should be read as funded, not necessarily installed.
- The volume behind the Cargill–ENOUGH offtake agreements. Never disclosed.
- The moisture basis of ENOUGH’s and Enifer’s stated tonnages. Discussed above.
- The Meiji–California Cultured agreement. GFI Europe describes Meiji as having signed a binding multi-year offtake agreement with California Cultured in 2023 for cell-based cocoa, before regulatory approval or scaled supply, citing a vegconomist report. We were unable to fetch that underlying report and have not independently verified it. We include it here attributed to GFI Europe rather than as established fact, because if true it is the clearest example in the category of a buyer moving first — and it moved in response to cocoa supply volatility, not to persuasion.
- The Better Meat Co’s position since June 2024. All figures in this piece are from that date. We found no more recent disclosure of its capacity, capital or demand book, and it may have changed materially.
- The year of Enifer’s self-affirmed GRAS determination. The source states the company self-affirmed “in September” without giving a year. Given the article’s March 2026 publication date, September 2025 is the natural reading, but we have not confirmed it and have written “the preceding September” rather than assert a year.
What to watch
- Whether Enifer’s FDA filing converts into a disclosed supply agreement. The company stated the filing was made to enable long-term supply planning and pointed at a 2026 production ramp-up. If no supply agreement is announced within twelve months of a decision, the regulatory-status-as-sales-tool thesis is weaker than it looks.
- Whether any company in this category publishes a tonnage on a stated moisture basis. It costs nothing and would make the category comparable. That none has done so is itself a finding.
- Whether the ENOUGH structure gets copied. Equity plus co-location plus feedstock plus resale is a replicable template, and the large ingredient houses all have underused plant. If a second deal of that shape appears, it stops being a one-off and becomes the category’s actual financing model.