On 15 October 2026 the UK-headquartered fermentation company Mycofeast announced it had acquired Daisy Lab, the Auckland precision-fermentation start-up working on bovine lactoferrin. The deal terms were not disclosed. The two capacity figures the coverage does give are the ones that matter: Daisy Lab had progressed from the lab to 500-litre fermentation, and Mycofeast operates a 16-million-litre fermentation plant, which FoodBev and Dairy News Today place in Poland. That is a ratio of 32,000 to one, by our arithmetic from the two reported figures.
The ratio is not the story by itself. The story is that in this deal, as in several other 2026 lactoferrin announcements, the start-up’s route to volume runs through a larger company’s tanks, and here the larger company bought the start-up outright. This piece lines up what each producer has disclosed about where its product will actually be made. It does not re-litigate the regulatory status of any of them; that is covered in our work on Helaina’s GRAS basis and on the mandatory-notification proposal.
What was actually announced
The facts that two or more outlets agree on are few. Mycofeast, founded in 2023, bought Daisy Lab; the founders take roles in the wider Mycofeast group; Daisy Lab’s lactoferrin programme continues, working with the R&D team at Evolutia Bio, Mycofeast’s California subsidiary; the deal gives Mycofeast a presence in Asia-Pacific. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Green Queen carries the most operational detail. Daisy Lab installed a 500-litre fermenter on site in the first quarter of 2026 and was scaling fermentation and downstream processing to that size. Over the next twelve months it plans further scale-up, regulatory filings, customer trials and transfer of the process into Mycofeast’s manufacturing plant. CEO Irina Miller told Green Queen that difficulties raising capital and weak food-tech and biotech market conditions steered the conversation towards an acquisition, and that no staff are being laid off. Mycofeast CEO Witek Hruzewicz, quoted by FoodBev, said the sector has “no shortage of exceptional science” and called Daisy Lab “highly complementary” to what Mycofeast is building.
Practical consequence: the 12-month plan lists scale-up, regulatory filings, customer trials and the transfer into the large plant side by side, without a stated order. None of the coverage names which markets the filings target; Miller referred only to “a couple of geographical priorities”.
What Daisy Lab had before the deal
A year earlier the picture was much smaller. In May 2025 Green Queen reported that Daisy Lab had raised NZ$1.75m (about US$1.08m) in total, was producing lactoferrin in its Auckland lab, had scaled beta-lactoglobulin to 10 g per litre, and planned to begin fundraising for a 1,000-litre demonstration facility. The company said then that cow’s milk contains roughly 0.02 to 0.2 g of lactoferrin per litre and that its yeast-derived protein reached “more than an order of magnitude” higher yield without disclosing exact figures. Miller said her regulatory approach would depend on where partners were based, and described Daisy Lab as an enabler for existing dairy operators rather than a disruptor.
Set the May 2025 plan against October 2026. The planned 1,000-litre demonstrator became a 500-litre fermenter, installed in Q1 2026. We cannot tell from the sources whether the 500-litre unit was the intended demonstrator at half size or a separate step. We also cannot confirm how much was raised between May 2025 and the deal: the October coverage does not give a funding total.
The field: where each producer says it will be made
| Producer | Disclosed scale-up route | Disclosed money | Source basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daisy Lab (bovine) | 500 L own fermenter (Q1 2026), then process transfer into Mycofeast’s 16 million L plant within 12 months | NZ$1.75m raised as of May 2025; later total not stated | Green Queen, FoodBev, Dairy News Today |
| TurtleTree (bovine) | Exclusive agreement with Novonesis to scale, manufacture and commercialise; production planned at Novonesis’s Blair, US facility; Novonesis focuses on early-life nutrition and holds selected supplement rights | About $40m raised since 2019; nine employees as of January 2025; minor investments from Novonesis and 21Catalyst Ventures, amounts undisclosed | Green Queen (July 2026, May 2025) |
| Vivici (bovine) | Vivitein BLG made in Asia; additional manufacturing partners expected from late 2026 through 2027; industrial-scale facility in Abu Dhabi being explored with The Every Company and the Abu Dhabi Investment Office | $34.7m Series A in 2025; a €12.5m European Innovation Council Accelerator grant in June 2026 | Green Queen (Feb 2026), DairyReporter |
| Helaina (human) | Metric-ton volumes through co-manufacturing partners that were not named; company claims 10 million servings per production run; Nestlé collaboration announced June 2026 | Not stated in the sources we fetched | AgFunderNews, DairyReporter |
| All G (bovine) | Focus on the US and China per DairyReporter; manufacturing route not found in any source we read | Not stated | DairyReporter |
Every row with a stated route has a counterparty or a planned partner supplying capacity: Mycofeast, Novonesis, unnamed co-manufacturers, and “additional manufacturing partners” for Vivici. In two rows (Daisy Lab and, in part, TurtleTree) the counterparty took equity or ownership. We found no start-up in this set that discloses plans to build and run its own commercial plant. That is an observation about disclosures, not a claim that none exists.
Practical consequence: if you are qualifying a lactoferrin supplier, the useful diligence question is not “do you have a fermenter” but “whose plant, which vessel size, and under what agreement does commercial product come out of”. A 500-litre fermenter and a 10-million-serving claim are different kinds of statements, and only one of them names a site.
Why the economics push this way
Conventional lactoferrin is scarce. Green Queen’s October 2026 and July 2026 pieces put purified lactoferrin at roughly $600 to $2,000 per kg, while its 2025 pieces used $750 to $1,500 per kg. The same outlet therefore carries two ranges within eighteen months; we use neither as a measured market price, since the articles do not name a price source. Both cite the same physical constraint: about 10,000 litres of milk per kilogram of purified lactoferrin. DairyReporter adds that lactoferrin is only about 1% of whey protein.
In May 2025 Miller said she expected production costs at scale to be about ten times below the commodity price. If that claim applied to the $750 to $1,500 range it would imply roughly $75 to $150 per kg, but that is our arithmetic on a company projection, not a disclosed cost. No source we read gives a cost per kilogram achieved at any fermenter size by any producer here.
What the economics do show is why a small fermenter is not a dead end for a high-value protein. Miller argued that low inclusion rates and scarcity make the economics work against an established industry. A product priced in the hundreds of dollars per kilogram can bear a lot of tolling cost. The consequence is that the bottleneck is not the price of a litre of fermentation but access to downstream purification at scale, and that is exactly what a company with an operating plant holds.
The counter-argument
The strongest case against reading this as distress is that it is ordinary vertical integration. Mycofeast describes a portfolio of carotenoids, dairy proteins and other biologically produced ingredients on a platform that includes strain development and industrial production. Daisy Lab brings a dairy-protein programme and a team; Hruzewicz’s “complementary” framing is credible. Daisy Lab was not running a sales process, and the companies had worked together as potential partner and customer before the acquisition talks. A buyer with tanks and a start-up with a validated strain is a rational pairing.
The reply is that both can be true. Miller herself linked the deal to capital-raising difficulties. Green Queen’s market context counts more than 90 alternative-protein companies that have merged, been acquired, gone bankrupt or ceased operations since September 2024. An acquisition can be a good outcome and still signal that the stand-alone route, raise, build, scale, was not available. The sources do not let us weigh those readings; they let us say the integration was the exit that was reported.
What we could not establish
- Deal value and terms. Not disclosed by any outlet.
- Daisy Lab’s founding year. Green Queen says 2023; FoodBev and Dairy News Today say 2021. We have not resolved this.
- Where the Mycofeast plant is. Green Queen says Europe; FoodBev and Dairy News Today say Poland. We use Poland only as attributed to those two outlets.
- What the 16 million litres means. No source says whether it is total vessel volume or the largest vessel, or whether the plant is suitable for secreted yeast proteins such as lactoferrin. The 32,000-to-one ratio compares a fermenter with a plant, so it measures group scale, not a like-for-like scale-up step.
- Daisy Lab’s funding total at acquisition. The last figure we have is NZ$1.75m from May 2025.
- Purified lactoferrin’s market price. Two different ranges appear, neither with a named source.
- All G’s manufacturing route and Helaina’s co-manufacturers. Not found in the sources read.
- Regulatory filings for Daisy Lab. The target markets were not named, and the sources report no approval or GRAS status for its product.
What to watch
- Whether Daisy Lab or Mycofeast names the target markets for its regulatory filings within the 12-month plan.
- Whether the transfer into Mycofeast’s plant is reported complete, and at what vessel size.
- Whether Vivici names its additional manufacturing partners, expected from late 2026 through 2027, or confirms an Abu Dhabi site.
- Whether Novonesis reports commercial lactoferrin output from Blair for TurtleTree.
- Whether any lactoferrin producer publishes a cost per kilogram at a stated vessel size. Until one does, every cost claim in this category is a projection.