In February 2023, Liberation Labs told the trade press that its Richmond, Indiana plant would be a $115m, 600,000-litre precision fermentation facility — the first purpose-built commercial-scale plant of its kind in the United States. It broke ground that June. Commercial production was expected at the end of 2024.

As of today, 23 August 2026, the most recent company statement we could locate is a press release dated 15 January 2026, which describes the company as one that “nears completion of its first precision fermentation plant in Richmond, Indiana in 2026”. We could not locate any announcement that the plant has begun commercial production.

That is a gap of roughly twenty months between the original date and today, across at least three restatements of the schedule. None of the restatements acknowledged the previous one, and no reason for the movement has been published.

This matters beyond one company. Liberation’s plant is the anchor asset for a specific industry thesis — that precision fermentation companies can stay asset-light and buy capacity from a domestic contract manufacturer instead of building their own. The thesis has a single load-bearing dependency in the US, and its commissioning date has moved by about two years without explanation.

The schedule, assembled

Every date below is taken from a source we fetched and read. Where a source restates a date without reference to the prior one, that is noted.

Date of statement Source Stated status and start of production
December 2022 Pharmaceutical Technology project record $20m seed round led by Agronomics and Siddhi Capital; proceeds partly used to buy and develop the site
28 February 2023 Manufacturing Dive Richmond site selected; $115m plant; capacity “up to 600,000 litres”; 36-acre parcel; first of six planned facilities; groundbreaking expected “later this spring”
April 2023 Pharmaceutical Technology project record $30m equipment financing secured
June 2023 Pharmaceutical Technology project record Construction started; groundbreaking ceremony held
10 July 2023 Manufacturing Dive Facility “expected to begin commercial production at the end of 2024”
26 September 2023 Pharmaceutical Technology project record “Expected Commercial Production: Late 2024”; 45 manufacturing jobs projected
7 May 2025 GlobeNewswire (Vivici partnership) Vivici named first customer; production to happen “when commercial production begins in 2026”; company “in the late stages of constructing”
2 June 2025 GlobeNewswire (rebrand) Renamed Liberation Bioindustries; plant “scheduled to begin operations in Richmond, Indiana in early 2026”; boilerplate says “expected to begin production in 2026”
15 January 2026 GlobeNewswire (founder roles) Company “nears completion of its first precision fermentation plant in Richmond, Indiana in 2026”; still “in the late stages of constructing”
23 August 2026 — No announcement of first production located

Two features of this table are worth isolating.

First, the phrase “in the late stages of constructing” appears verbatim in the May 2025, June 2025 and January 2026 releases. The same status language covered a period of at least eight months. It is boilerplate carried between releases, and it conveys no information about progress.

Second, the target moved from a month-precision claim (“end of 2024”, “late 2024”) to a quarter-precision claim (“early 2026”) to a year-precision claim (“in 2026”). Widening precision as a date approaches is the opposite of what happens on a project that is converging. That pattern is legible even without knowing the cause.

Practical consequence. If you are underwriting a supply plan against Richmond, the useful input is not the stated year but the precision of the statement. A commissioning date that has become less specific over three years should be modelled as unbounded until a first-production announcement exists.

What 600,000 litres does and does not commit to

The 600,000-litre figure has been stated consistently since February 2023 — creditably so; it has not drifted. But it is a vessel volume, not an output.

The Pharmaceutical Technology project record adds that the facility “will feature 150,000-litre fermenters” alongside a dedicated downstream process with separation and drying units, and gives total fermentation capacity as 600,000 litres. It does not state how many fermenters there are. Four vessels of 150,000 litres would reconcile to the stated total, but that is our arithmetic, not a disclosure.

Converting litres of installed vessel volume into tonnes of shipped protein requires at least four numbers, none of which is public for this plant:

Variable What it determines Disclosed?
Titre (g/L) Grams of target protein per litre of broth No
Batch cycle time Runs per vessel per year No
Downstream recovery yield Fraction surviving separation and drying No
Utilisation Share of the year the plant actually runs No

Without those, 600,000 litres cannot be turned into tonnes of beta-lactoglobulin, and no reader can independently check whether the plant is large or small relative to the demand it is meant to serve. This is the same measurement problem we identified in mycoprotein capacity figures quoted in tonnes without a stated basis and in Perfect Day’s Bharuch capacity, which has never been disclosed at all — but it bites harder here, because in this case the litre figure is being used as the denominator of a commercial claim.

“Under contract or in late stages of agreements”

The January 2026 release states that “well over 50 percent of nameplate capacity at the Richmond plant” is “under contract or in late stages of agreements”.

Read precisely, that sentence merges two categories with very different legal weight. A signed offtake contract and an agreement in “late stages” are not the same instrument, and the release does not disclose the split. A reader cannot tell whether the plant is 55% contracted and 0% in negotiation, or 5% contracted and 50% in negotiation. Both satisfy the sentence.

Compounding this, the denominator is the litre figure discussed above. “Over 50 percent of nameplate capacity” is therefore a percentage of a number that has no product basis — a share of vessel volume rather than a share of sellable output.

We are not suggesting the claim is untrue. We are pointing out that it is constructed so that it cannot be checked, and so that it cannot later be shown to have been wrong. That is a design choice in the disclosure, and it is common enough in this sector that operators should read for it. We flagged the same structure in an Abu Dhabi four-million-litre agreement that was an agreement to explore, not to build.

Practical consequence. When a capacity-commitment percentage is offered, ask for the contracted share alone, and ask for the denominator in tonnes of specified product. If a counterparty will give neither, the percentage is marketing.

One named customer, and what it is waiting for

The only publicly named Richmond customer is Vivici, the Dutch precision fermentation company, announced 7 May 2025 as “the first customer at Liberation Labs’ Richmond, Indiana plant” for its beta-lactoglobulin ingredient, Vivitein BLG.

Vivici’s stated rationale is explicit in the release: CEO Stephan van Sint Fiet said the partnership “expands our European manufacturing capabilities, providing US customers with increased supply security” for the ingredient. Liberation’s then-CEO Mark Warner called Vivici “a perfect reference case for our facility”.

So the named customer’s US supply security is contingent on a plant whose start date has moved three times. This is the concrete form the asset-light thesis takes: the ingredient company’s route to the US market is a line item on somebody else’s construction schedule.

We could not establish whether Vivici has since secured alternative US capacity, nor whether its agreement with Liberation contains a long-stop date. Neither party has published those terms.

Governance: what the January change signals, and what it does not

On 15 January 2026 the co-founders swapped roles: Mark Warner moved from CEO to CTO, and Etan Bendheim moved from Chief Business Officer to CEO.

Both men described this in the release as a deliberate specialisation rather than a correction. Warner: “My focus has always been on designing and building facilities that can operate at commercial scale, and stepping into the CTO role allows me to dedicate all of my energy to getting Richmond up and running.” Bendheim: “Mark and I have always operated with a clear division of responsibilities, and formalizing that structure puts us in the best position for what comes next.”

Read charitably — and this reading is entirely plausible — moving the engineer founder onto the commissioning problem full time is what a company does when it is serious about finishing. Read sceptically, a founder-CEO being moved to a technical role eleven months after a missed start date is a familiar shape.

We are not in a position to adjudicate between those readings, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can say is that the release itself connects the change to the plant: the stated purpose is to align leadership “as the company nears completion of its first precision fermentation plant.”

The counter-argument

The case for reading all of this benignly is strong and should be stated properly.

First-of-a-kind plants slip, and this one is genuinely first-of-a-kind. There was no purpose-built commercial precision fermentation facility in the US to copy. Front-end engineering, long-lead equipment, commissioning and qualification on a novel process configuration routinely run over on projects with far more capital behind them. A twenty-month slip on a $115m first-of-a-kind facility is unremarkable by the standards of process industries generally.

Silence is not evidence of failure. Companies commonly do not announce commissioning milestones — mechanical completion, water batching, first fermentation, qualification runs — because none of them is a product launch. A plant can be substantially finished and running validation batches with no press release at all. The absence of an announcement is genuinely weak evidence.

The capital signals point forward, not backward. The company rebranded in June 2025 to reflect a broader industrial ambition, added a named customer, and has continued to advance a second site with Topian, NEOM’s food company, in Saudi Arabia. That partnership was announced in April 2025; the June 2025 release put the site at “the feasibility stage of planning”, and by January 2026 the company’s boilerplate said “planning is underway for our second plant in Saudi Arabia”. Companies in trouble do not usually progress second sites.

The honest summary is that the public record is consistent with a difficult but progressing first-of-a-kind project, and consistent with a project in trouble. It does not distinguish between them. That is precisely the problem: the disclosure has been structured so that both readings survive.

What we could not establish

  • Whether the Richmond plant has begun commercial production. We found no announcement either way. We are reporting the absence of a public statement, not asserting that the plant is idle.
  • Why the schedule moved. No source we fetched gives a reason for any of the restatements.
  • The current status in the company’s own words. We attempted to fetch liberation.bio directly and were unable to retrieve it in this session. Our latest company-sourced statement is therefore the 15 January 2026 release. If the site carries a more recent status, this article does not reflect it.
  • The contracted-versus-negotiating split behind “well over 50 percent of nameplate capacity”, and the denominator in tonnes.
  • The number of fermenters. 150,000-litre vessels are stated; the count is not. Four is arithmetic, not disclosure.
  • Whether the $115m figure still stands. It dates from 2023 reporting and the September 2023 project record. We found no updated capital cost, and no confirmation of the total raised to complete construction. A widely-cited $50.5m completion financing appears in trade coverage, but the page we attempted to fetch returned no content, so we have excluded the figure rather than cite it unread.
  • Whether the 45-job projection has been met. Stated in the September 2023 project record; no later employment figure located.

What to watch

Four testable things, each of which would resolve part of the ambiguity above:

  1. A first-production or first-shipment announcement naming a product and a date. This is the single milestone that converts the plant from a schedule into an asset.
  2. A tonnage figure for a named product. Any disclosure that converts 600,000 litres into tonnes of BLG per year — even approximate, with a stated basis — would make the capacity commitments checkable for the first time.
  3. Vivici’s US supply language. If Vivici begins describing US supply without naming Richmond, or names a second manufacturer, that is information about the plant’s timeline that the plant’s owner has not published.
  4. The Saudi second site. Movement from “planning underway” to a committed capital number and a construction start would be a meaningful confidence signal; continued planning-stage language through 2027 would be the opposite.

We will update this article rather than write a second one when the first-production position changes. The value here is the assembled schedule, and a reference table is worth more maintained than repeated.