Everything we have written about fermentation-derived ingredients so far has described the same commercial shape. A protein is made that is molecularly identical to an animal one, it is sold as a functional equivalent, and it costs more than the incumbent — which is why switching to it is a reformulation project with a business case attached.

Two suppliers now quoting into foodservice have inverted every part of that.

Neither claims equivalence. Both are sold as partial replacements. And both lead their pitch with a discount to the incumbent protein, quoted as a percentage:

Supplier Ingredient Format Quoted price position
JOYN Foods (50CUT) Frozen mycelium from edible mushroom strains Frozen, blended into ground meat “25%, sometimes even 30% less than the cheapest beef you can find in the US, the lowest commodity beef you can buy” — cofounder Shalom Daniel
Black Sheep Foods DualTexture Protein, extruded wheat and fava bean Shelf-stable dry, rehydrated “around 33% cheaper than beef”

For a formulator, that changes the question being asked. It is no longer can this ingredient do what the animal protein does. It is how much of it can I put in before somebody notices.

Inclusion rate is the specification

The number that matters for both products is the inclusion rate, and it is the number both companies lead with.

Commodity TVP — invented by ADM in the 1960s to texturise soy protein, and made by low-moisture extrusion from soy, wheat or pea — is routinely added to processed meat as a filler at 10–15% inclusion. Push past that and, per AgFunderNews’s description of the category, it “can become spongy or compromise eating quality”.

Black Sheep’s claim is that its DualTexture particle raises that ceiling. CEO Hans Kunisch says most partners are working at 30–50% inclusion, and that its first development partner, a small Dutch processor, tested it as high as 70% “without compromising taste or texture”. One named customer, the Efteling theme park in Amsterdam, has replaced 40% of the beef in some dishes.

The mechanism claimed is structural rather than compositional: “The DualTexture particle has a hydrophilic (water-loving) fiber region and a lipophilic (fat-loving) trap region, extruded as one structure. This means you get the muscle structure of HME but the fat and the flavors lock into the muscle structure.”

That is a claim about where the fat goes, which is the actual failure mode of high-inclusion extended meat — fat and flavour compounds migrating out of the particle during cooking, giving the dry, spongy result. Whether it holds at 50% across cooking methods is exactly what the fourteen active trials Kunisch describes will determine, and none of that data is public.

JOYN’s mycelium makes a related but distinct claim. Daniel argues mushroom mycelium works better in ground meat than chopped fruiting bodies because it acts “like a sponge, absorbing water, juiciness, fat, aromatic compounds”, and that this delivers two ingredient substitutions at once:

  • It replaces the binder. “Our product binds to meat without needing binding agents such as eggs, breadcrumbs, or methylcellulose.”
  • It avoids the two major allergens normally used to extend meat. Soy and wheat are both declarable allergens; mushroom mycelium is not.

That second point cuts against Black Sheep, whose DualTexture protein is made from wheat and fava beans — so it carries a wheat declaration and, in the EU, fava is a legume that some formulators will want to look at carefully. The two products are not interchangeable on a label even where they are interchangeable on a spec sheet.

Why the price works: neither company owns a fermenter

The reason both can quote below beef is that neither has built the capital base that the mycoprotein producers we mapped have.

JOYN is explicitly contrasted by AgFunderNews with Quorn, ENOUGH Food and The Better Meat Co, “which use fungi strains fed on sugary feedstock grown via submerged fermentation in steel bioreactors”. JOYN instead partners with indoor farmers who grow its strains in trays via solid-state fermentation on tailored substrates — upcycled materials including wood chips and beer waste — with co-manufacturers then roasting, grinding and freezing the harvested material before it ships.

Black Sheep’s route is the same idea applied to extrusion. Its ingredient “can be manufactured on existing extrusion lines at contract manufacturers using Black Sheep’s recipes and settings”. Kunisch is blunt that this is the whole business case: “Crucially, Black Sheep is not asking partners to install new equipment, change their production processes or introduce their customers to a novel concept… It’s a pure economic argument.”

Both companies also arrived here by retreating from a branded consumer business. Black Sheep was founded in 2019 by Sunny Kumar and Ismael Montanez to make plant-based lamb; by 2023 the cost of goods was high and margins low, and Kunisch — who helped build Impossible Foods’ early sales operation — took over and “massively slimmed down” the company. JOYN began in Israel in 2021 as Mush Foods. In both cases the ingredient was already in the building; the branded product was the thing that got cut.

What this looks like on the P&L

This is the part that separates these two from most alternative protein claims, because both have disclosed operating figures rather than projections alone.

JOYN, per cofounder Shalom Daniel:

  • Sales over $250k a month, growing 13–14% month-over-month
  • Gross margins over 30%, with “a path to get them higher”
  • Around $10m raised in total, currently raising a small round
  • Expects to triple revenues in 2026 and again in 2027, and to be EBITDA-positive in early 2027
  • Distribution through Sysco, US Foods and Compass Group into universities, hospitals, cruise lines, hotel chains, corporate clients including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, American Express and Citibank, and venues from Seattle Zoo to the Monterey Bay Aquarium
  • Newly approved by the South Carolina Purchasing Alliance, its first move into K-12 — a segment Daniel notes is collectively “one of the largest purchasers of ground beef in the country”

Black Sheep, per Kunisch:

  • Began pitching the platform in February 2026; first regional European processor launches from September 2026, with multi-billion-dollar manufacturers targeting 2027
  • 14 active trials advancing toward commercialisation
  • A private-label programme with a top-three EU grocer
  • Demand at two accounts already capped by supply
  • Raising a small bridge round; offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam

The phrase “demand capped by supply” is the one to sit with. It is the same condition we found in signed offtake agreements with no capacity behind them — except that here the constraint sits at a contract manufacturer rather than at a plant the company would have to build, which makes it a scheduling problem rather than a financing one.

The measurement problem, again

We are not recording either price claim as a cost datapoint, and we want to be explicit about why, because it is the same defect we keep finding.

Neither figure states a basis. “25–30% less than the cheapest commodity beef” and “around 33% cheaper than beef” are both ratios to an unnamed reference price. To use either one, a buyer would need to know:

  • Which beef. US commodity ground beef, EU processor-grade trim and a retail 80/20 mince are not the same price and do not move together.
  • Measured how. Per kilogram of ingredient as delivered, or per kilogram of finished blended product? JOYN’s product is frozen; Black Sheep’s is shelf-stable dry and rehydrated before use. A dry ingredient at a 33% discount per delivered kilogram is a completely different proposition once you add the water it takes up, and neither company states which convention it is using.
  • At what date. Both quotes were given during a period when meat prices had reached record levels. A discount to a peak is not the same as a structural cost advantage.

None of this means either claim is wrong. It means neither can be compared with the other, or with any figure in our cost data gap piece, which is precisely the industry-wide problem. A formulator evaluating both will have to normalise the two quotes themselves, on their own beef reference, before the comparison in the table above means anything.

The counter-argument

Hybrid is not a category, it is a discount, and discounts get competed away. If the entire proposition is that an extender costs less than beef, then the moment beef prices fall the proposition weakens — and the record beef prices of 2025–26 are doing a great deal of work in both pitches. Daniel says so himself, in effect: “I’m not trying to save cows or the planet. I’m here to solve pain points for the industry.” A pain point that eases takes the pitch with it.

And the extender category is old. Blended burgers using chopped mushroom fruiting bodies have been marketed for years, and TVP has been extending meat since the 1960s. Two suppliers claiming a better particle is an incremental improvement in a commodity category, not a new industry. Kunisch himself frames it that way, which is to his credit: “This is not a new technology searching for a market. It is a major performance leap inside a category already used at global scale.”

The strongest response is that the incremental framing is exactly why it is working. Nobody has to be persuaded to buy a category they already buy. And there is corroborating movement elsewhere: Lidl, Colruyt and Albert Heijn have all been running hybrid products in Europe, and Ginga Foods launched half-and-half sausages in Japan on 13 August 2026. That is three retail-scale European chains and a new market, not one supplier’s optimism.

What we could not establish

  • No absolute price per kilogram for either ingredient. Both companies quote only a percentage discount to an unnamed beef reference. We asked nothing of them directly; these are the figures as given to AgFunderNews.
  • We could not verify JOYN’s revenue or margin figures independently. The $250k/month, 13–14% month-over-month and 30%+ gross margin are all founder statements to a trade publication, not audited or filed figures.
  • The 70% inclusion result is one test at one processor. Black Sheep describes it as its first development partner, a small Dutch processor. It is not a published trial and no sensory panel data accompanies it.
  • We could not establish what “beer waste” and “wood chips” cost as substrates, or what share of JOYN’s cost they represent — which is the figure that would tell you whether the discount is durable.
  • Black Sheep’s fava and wheat base has allergen consequences we have not seen specified. Wheat is a declarable allergen in both the US and EU; we found no published allergen statement for the finished DualTexture ingredient.
  • AgFunderNews discloses that its parent, AgFunder, is an investor in Black Sheep Foods. We have flagged this rather than discounted the reporting, but readers should hold the Black Sheep figures to the standard that implies.

What to watch

  1. Whether the September 2026 European launches ship on time. Black Sheep’s claims are currently all forward-looking. A shipped private-label SKU at a top-three EU grocer would convert the whole story from trials to volume.
  2. Whether either company publishes an absolute price. The first supplier in this category to quote a real number per kilogram, with a stated basis, will make every competitor’s percentage look evasive.
  3. Whether inclusion rates hold as volumes rise. A 70% inclusion result at one small processor and a 40% replacement at one theme park are not the same as 50% across a national foodservice contract.
  4. What happens to the pitch if beef prices fall. Both propositions are quoted as a discount to a peak.
  5. Label language. Meati was hit with a false advertising lawsuit over “mushroom root” claims; Daniel cites avoiding that exposure as a reason for using edible mushroom strains. How these ingredients are declared on-pack is an unresolved risk for anyone formulating with them.