On 15 June 2026 The EVERY Company announced an agreement that “quadruples EVERY’s production capacity” for OvoPro, its precision-fermented ovalbumin, and disclosed that in the first four months of 2026 it “secured annual orders worth 550% of its total 2025 order volume.” Neither number has a base in the release. The one base figure that exists anywhere — 63,000 litres of industrial fermentation in 2025, doubled at the start of 2026 — appears not on the wire but in a Green Queen interview, and even that describes the scale EVERY was running at, not the scale the 4x is measured from.

This is not a gotcha. EVERY is one of the few precision-fermentation companies actually shipping metric tons under a commercial supply relationship. But an operator evaluating OvoPro as a supply line needs to know which figures are disclosed quantities and which are ratios to undisclosed ones.

What the release actually says

The primary text, identical on Business Wire and every.com, carries four quantitative claims. The agreement “quadruples EVERY’s production capacity” — no starting volume, no ending volume, no timeframe. Orders secured in the first four months of 2026 are “worth 550% of its total 2025 order volume” — no 2025 volume, no unit. Biovet AD’s Bulgarian infrastructure boasts “over 9,000,000L of installed fermentation capacity.” And EVERY is “producing at steady state production delivering metric tons to customers regularly” — no tonnage, no period.

The release also contradicts itself: its subhead reads “After EVERY Grows Annual Orders by over 550%” — growth by 550%, implying 6.5x — while the body says orders “worth 550% of” the 2025 volume, implying 5.5x. We use the body wording, which is more conservative and is what the interview-based coverage reproduced.

Practical consequence: when a supplier hands you a multiple, the question is not “of what?” but “of what, in what unit, over what period, and is the denominator the same instrument as the numerator?”

The base that exists

Green Queen’s Anay Mridul, who interviewed CEO Arturo Elizondo for both the June and July pieces, reported the only hard capacity figure in the public record: in 2025 EVERY “was already producing several tonnes of its product at a 63,000-litre industrial scale with Huvepharma. It had already doubled its capacity at the start of 2026, with plans to further double it next year.”

Elizondo added operational detail no press release carried. EVERY has manufactured with Huvepharma for three years, and the June expansion is in the same facility, not a new site: “OvoPro was one of several products Huvepharma was producing in one of their Bulgaria sites. Now, the facility is transitioning to being fully dedicated to Every across multiple fermenters.”

That reframes the deal. This is not new steel; it is the reallocation of an existing multi-product site to a single tenant — a real commitment from Biovet, and cheaper and faster than the alternative, since Elizondo notes wholly owned facilities “are often +$200M and have multi-year lead times.” But reallocation and expansion are different capital events, and the release does not separate them.

The arithmetic, stated as arithmetic

Stacking the disclosed figures gives a range, not an answer. If the 63,000-litre 2025 scale doubled at the start of 2026, EVERY entered the year near 126,000 litres. A 4x from there is roughly 504,000 litres; a 4x from the 2025 base is roughly 252,000. EVERY has not said which applies.

Either figure lands at 2.8% to 5.6% of Biovet’s stated 9,000,000-litre estate. Even on the most generous reading, OvoPro occupies a low single-digit percentage of the host facility. Those 9 million litres are context about the landlord, not the tenant.

Practical consequence: if a supplier cites a co-manufacturer’s total installed litres, ask what fraction is contractually allocated to you and on what notice it can be reallocated. Estate size tells you about the CDMO’s balance sheet, not your supply security.

The 550% is an order book

The 550% is the strongest commercial signal in the release and the one most likely to be misread. It describes annual orders secured in four months against total 2025 order volume. It is a book — not a shipment, not revenue.

Elizondo told Green Queen where the volume goes: “fulfilling orders for Walmart and Target retail placement through our customers, as well as building inventory for larger launches planned for later in the year,” with “the bulk of the orders coming from existing customers supporting larger volumes of their existing SKUs already featuring OvoPro.” Expansion inside an existing customer base beats a long tail of new logos, because it means the ingredient survived a reorder decision. But an order book converts to revenue only if the capacity arrives, and inventory build is not sell-through.

Practical consequence: treat order-book growth as a demand indicator and nothing more. Ask for the 2025 denominator in tonnes. Without it, the order multiple cannot be reconciled against the capacity multiple.

The 9 million litres, and what kind of litres they are

The 9,000,000-litre figure originates with EVERY and Huvepharma, not an independent audit. Elizondo repeats it in his own voice: Huvepharma is “one of the largest industrial fermentation players in the world, with over nine million litres of installed fermentation capacity.” Cultivated X adds that Biovet runs three Bulgarian sites — Peshtera, Razgrad and Botevgrad — with EU and US FDA GMP approvals. The European Investment Bank corroborates the estate’s purpose: project 20160727, “BIOVET PESHTERA,” was a roughly EUR 212 million build with EUR 125 million of EIB finance, classified under Annex II of the EIA Directive as “an industrial facility for the production of pharmaceutical products.” That is the design intent, on the record from the lender.

Which matters because of an argument GFI made with Integration Consulting in 2023. GFI identified 89 manufacturers — 48 in-house producers and 41 food-exclusive CMOs — totalling roughly 16 million litres available to the fermentation-derived food protein industry. Adding the 53 CMOs that make food-grade product but also serve pharma and industrial customers raises that by 250%, to about 40 million litres. GFI then argues against its own upper bound:

These categories typically involve manufacturing higher-margin products (up to 70% profit margins for pharmaceuticals). This poses a challenge for fermentation-derived product manufacturers in terms of accessing these facilities, suggesting that the estimated functional capacity is much closer to the lower bound of 16 million liters.

The white paper is specific about why. Pharma facilities are “designed on pharmaceutical GMP, and end-products are commonly produced at lower quantities than the volumes needed to drive down the cost of food production.” Their control systems demand “more operator supervision and input compared to fermentation-derived production, increasing OPEX.” And because pharma GMP exposes high-capex equipment to high temperatures, corrosive chemicals and abrasive materials, “companies are likely to utilize it for the entire lifecycle and decommission once it is no longer usable.”

Set Biovet’s 9 million litres against GFI’s 16-million-litre food-certified figure and the arithmetic is absurd on its face: one Bulgarian animal-health group would hold 56% of the world’s food fermentation capacity. It does not. Those litres sit in the class GFI deliberately excluded. What a food buyer needs is not the estate total but the fermenters qualified, allocated and scheduled for food-grade OvoPro — which nobody has published.

Practical consequence: when a CDMO’s installed litres are cited in a food context, ask three separate questions — how many hold food-grade certification, how many are contractually allocated to this product, and what the scheduling priority is when a higher-margin pharma order competes for the same train.

What is disclosed and what is not

Metric Figure disclosed Source Base stated?
Capacity expansion multiple 4x (“quadruples”) Business Wire / every.com, 15 June 2026 No
Prior industrial scale, 2025 63,000 litres Elizondo to Green Queen, 16 June and 14 July 2026 Yes — the only base figure
Capacity change, start of 2026 Doubled Elizondo to Green Queen, 26 February and 16 June 2026 Yes — from the 63,000-litre scale
Post-expansion capacity Not published No source states it No
Order growth Annual orders worth 550% of 2025 order volume, Jan–Apr 2026 Business Wire / every.com, 15 June 2026 No
2025 order volume, and unit of the 550% Not published No source states it No
Host facility installed capacity Over 9,000,000 litres, three Bulgarian sites Business Wire; Elizondo; Cultivated X for site split Company claim, not audited
Food-grade share, and litres allocated to OvoPro Not published; site “transitioning to being fully dedicated to Every” Elizondo to Green Queen, 16 June 2026 No
Host facility build cost ~EUR 212m total, EUR 125m EIB finance EIB project 20160727 Yes — for the 2017–2020 build
Shipment cadence “Metric tons to customers regularly” Business Wire / every.com No tonnage, no period
US regulatory status GRN 001104, FDA “no questions” letter FDA response letter Fully documented
Global food-certified capacity, 2023 ~16 million litres, 89 manufacturers GFI / Integration Consulting Yes, with methodology
Combined Huvepharma + ADM volumes Declined — “under wraps” Elizondo to Green Queen, 14 July 2026 No

Where the trade press disagreed

An unanchored figure degrades fast in transmission. Food Business News and Baking Business, both Sosland titles carrying Brooke Just’s reporting, state that Biovet’s Peshtera site “features more than 9,000 liters of fermentation capacity” — a thousandfold understatement, identical in both titles. Both also say EVERY “expects to nearly quadruple” capacity where the release says “quadruples,” and neither mentions the 550% figure at all. WATTPoultry.com renders the order claim as “worth more than 550%,” adding a qualifier the release body does not contain. Cultivated X and Green Queen reproduce the body wording exactly, and that is what we have used.

The regulatory basis is the best-documented item here

OvoPro’s US clearance is the one part of this story with a complete public record, and it shows what full disclosure looks like.

Keller and Heckman LLP filed GRAS Notice GRN 001104 on behalf of Clara Foods Co., doing business as The EVERY Company, on 12 September 2022. FDA filed it on 2 March 2023, received amendments through September 2023, and closed it on 17 October 2023 with a “no questions” response. The subject is “egg-white protein produced by Komagataella phaffii ATCC GSD-1235,” cleared as a substitute for hen egg-white protein and whole eggs across baked goods, gluten-free bread, plant-based meat alternatives, egg noodles, cereals, scrambled-egg formats, protein bars, dressings and shake mixes, plus use as a fining agent in wine and juice. It is cleared for neither infant formula nor anything under USDA jurisdiction.

Two details matter. FDA describes the substance as “a phosphoglycoprotein containing predominantly recombinant ovalbumin,” equivalent to Gal d 2 “with an N-terminal extension of four amino acids (EAEA)” — a more careful characterisation than the “pure ovalbumin protein” used in the release and repeated across the trade press. And the notice carries workable specifications: protein above 75% w/w, carbohydrate no more than 10%, fat below 0.4%, moisture no more than 10%, ash no more than 5%, lead no more than 0.1 mg/kg, Salmonella absent in 25 g. Allergen labelling is mandatory because the protein derives from egg.

Practical consequence: the GRAS file, not the press release, is the document to request. It carries the specification band, the cleared use list and the exclusions, all enforceable. See formulating with fermentation-derived protein for how those specs drive inclusion decisions.

Retail placement: EVERY is the ingredient, not the brand

The release cites “national placement in Target and Walmart.” EVERY sells no branded consumer product at either retailer. OvoPro sits inside customers’ products, and product marketing director Corinn Williams told Green Queen in February that “many of the precision fermentation pioneer’s customers keep the supply relationship confidential to maintain a competitive advantage.”

The one confirmed consumer-facing case is Healthier Comforts’ Animal-Free Egg White Protein Powder, which EVERY confirmed is “100% OvoPro” sold under the Healthier Comforts brand — with no mention of EVERY on pack at launch. It is priced near $3 per oz against Healthier Comforts’ conventional egg white powder at $2.85 and its pea protein at $1.36. That sits awkwardly beside Elizondo’s claim that OvoPro is “priced to be competitive with, or cheaper than, conventional battery-caged commodity eggs on a cost-in-use basis.” Both can be true — cost-in-use in a formulation is not shelf price for a single-ingredient powder — but neither is evidence for the other. See our comparison of WPC80 and fermented egg protein pricing.

Practical consequence: “national placement in Target and Walmart” describes a customer’s distribution, not the supplier’s. Ask which SKUs, at what inclusion rate, and whether the listing is a full-year plan or a seasonal test.

The counter-argument

Three points cut against the framing above, and none is weak.

Commercial confidentiality is normal. A supplier publishing exact capacity hands competitors a targeting map and customers a negotiating lever. Most ingredient companies do not publish plant-level volumes; holding EVERY to a standard incumbent egg processors do not meet would be inconsistent.

A CDMO’s installed litres are a real asset, not a rhetorical flourish. Biovet’s estate is EIB-financed, EU and FDA GMP-approved, and serves customers in more than 100 countries. GFI’s own 2023 analysis found CMOs serving commercial, demo and lab scale on one site averaged 634,000 litres — Biovet is an order of magnitude above that, and that headroom is exactly what removes the multi-year lead time Elizondo calls the industry’s bottleneck.

And GFI’s own position has moved. Its July 2026 APAC report documents Chinese pharma manufacturers diversifying into novel foods as biosimilar competition erodes pharma margins — the exact mechanism the 2023 analysis said would keep pharma capacity closed. If that holds in Bulgaria as it appears to in China, the lower-bound reasoning is dated. Growth off a small base is still growth, and a 4x on 126,000 litres is a materially different business from a 4x on 63,000.

What we could not establish

  • The base for the 4x — whether it runs from the 63,000-litre 2025 scale or the doubled early-2026 scale. Both readings fit the text.
  • Post-expansion capacity in litres or tonnes. Elizondo explicitly declined to give combined Huvepharma-plus-ADM annual volumes in July, calling them “under wraps.”
  • The 2025 order volume, and the unit of the 550% — tonnes, dollars, or contracted annual run-rate.
  • What share of Biovet’s 9,000,000 litres is food-grade certified, and how many are allocated to OvoPro.
  • The basis of the 9,000,000-litre figure. We found no independent audit, filing or regulatory document stating it, and huvepharma.com could not be retrieved during this research.
  • Whether the June expansion and the February “double it again next year” plan are the same event.
  • ADM Clinton’s OvoPro capacity, and any completion date for the Bulgarian expansion.

We searched the June and July 2026 releases on Business Wire and every.com, the October 2025 Series D release, the February 2026 Healthier Comforts release, Food Business News, Baking Business, WATTPoultry, Cultivated X, Green Queen, the FDA GRAS notice inventory and the EIB project register. The 63,000-litre figure in the Green Queen interviews is the only capacity number we found.

What to watch

  1. Does ADM Clinton come online in 2027 with a published capacity? ADM has reporting obligations EVERY does not. If a litre or tonne figure for the Clinton line appears, it will likely come from ADM.
  2. Does EVERY ever publish a 2025 order volume? A company that discloses a multiple and later its denominator is behaving consistently. One that never does has told you the denominator was small.
  3. Does the Bulgarian expansion get a completion announcement with a number attached? Watch H1 2027. A second multiple with no base would make this house style rather than a one-off.
  4. Does Biovet describe any part of its estate as food-grade dedicated? “Food-grade quality at industrial volumes” is a quality claim, not a certification claim.
  5. Does the Onego Bio litigation produce discovery on capacity? The Delaware dispute is ongoing, and IP litigation between the only two companies with US clearance for precision-fermented egg protein is a plausible route to figures neither would publish voluntarily.
  6. Does GFI refresh the 16-million-litre census? A new count would settle whether estates like Biovet’s belong in the food column. Our fermentation capacity map tracks disclosed figures as they land; the Perfect Day Bharuch case is the closest comparable — a plant four years into announcement with no published capacity at all.