On 25 June 2024 the Paris commercial court approved a plan de cession transferring the assets and activities of METEX NØØVISTA, the subsidiary of Metabolic Explorer that operated a biorefinery on the Carling-Saint-Avold chemical platform in Moselle, to a Belgian start-up called MAASH. L’Usine Nouvelle put the value of the operation at €2 million and reported that 10 of the site’s 46 employees kept their jobs. The plant it bought had been inaugurated on 23 September 2021 as an investment of €48 million, carried by a joint venture of Metex and Bpifrance’s SPI fund with public support from the EU, the state and the region, and designed to make 6,000 tonnes a year of 1,3-propanediol and butyric acid from glycerine.
MAASH’s own press release the following month said the aim was to adapt the existing fermentation process into a mycoprotein production unit, that the company “espère rapidement modifier les installations pour passer en phase industrielle avec une première capacité projetée de 10.000 tonnes par an”, and that once that first phase was done it envisaged two more lines of 30,000 tonnes each on the spare land.
Twenty-five months later, on 25 August 2026, MAASH announced a €12.15 million financing package. Every account of it — the company’s quotes in EU-Startups and Cultivated X, the Grand Est bioeconomy portal, Green Queen — says the same thing about what the money is for: the launch of a 12 m³ demonstration plant at Carling-Saint-Avold, and preparation for a later scale-up to 10,000 tonnes a year. The incoming chief executive’s stated first task is to “deliver the pre-industrial project”.
A 12 m³ vessel is a pilot fermenter. A site built for 6,000 tonnes of chemicals is an industrial one. The distance between the two is the story of what a distressed fermentation asset is actually worth to the company that buys it, and it is the same distance this publication keeps finding when it looks at fermentation capacity claims: the tank exists, the process does not.
What Carling was built to do, and what it cost
| Item | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Announced investment, April 2019 | €45m, co-venture of Metex and Bpifrance’s SPI fund | L’Usine Nouvelle, 5 April 2019 |
| Design capacity | 6,000 t/yr of PDO and butyric acid from glycerine; a second phase “could” take the site to 24,000 t/yr | L’Usine Nouvelle, 5 April 2019 |
| Engineering contractor | De Smet Engineers & Contractors | L’Usine Nouvelle, 5 April 2019 |
| Investment at inauguration, 23 September 2021 | €48m; 48 direct industrial jobs | TotalEnergies Direction France |
| First molecules produced | June 2021 | L’Usine Nouvelle, 2021 |
| Redressement judiciaire opened for METEX NØØVISTA | 25 March 2024 | Metabolic Explorer release, 26 June 2024 |
| Offers received | Two: MAASH’s plan de cession and a request to convert to liquidation | Metabolic Explorer release |
| Court judgment approving MAASH’s plan | 25 June 2024 | Metabolic Explorer release |
| Consideration | €2m | L’Usine Nouvelle, 27 June 2024 |
| Employees retained | 10 of 46 | L’Usine Nouvelle; MAASH release |
Metex’s deputy chief executive told L’Usine Nouvelle at the time that the €48 million project “n’était pas prévu pour être rentable au démarrage” — was not designed to be profitable at start-up — and that the plan had always been to reach that threshold with a second tranche two to four years after the first came on line. The second tranche was never built. The group’s Amiens lysine plant, hit by energy and sugar prices and Chinese lysine, went into redressement five days before its sister company, and its revenue fell from €138 million in 2022 to €35.2 million in 2023. Carling was collateral damage of a group failure, not a failed plant in its own right.
That matters for what MAASH bought. A 6,000-tonne chemical plant that was explicitly not expected to make money at 6,000 tonnes is not a 10,000-tonne mycoprotein plant in waiting. It is a set of fermenters, downstream equipment and utilities sized for a different organism, a different feedstock and a different product, on a Seveso-classified platform whose permitting Metex’s chief executive described in 2019 as “pas un mince challenge pour une petite société comme la nôtre”.
Practical consequence. The purchase price of a distressed fermentation site tells you what the creditors accepted, not what the asset can produce. €2 million for a €48 million plant is a 96% discount on the build cost; the conversion cost, which is the number that decides whether the buyer ever ships product, is the one nobody publishes.
What the €12.15 million is, line by line
| Component | Amount | Provider | Type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equity round | €5.85m | Ambra Capital, InvestPro, Bpifrance Amorçage Industriel, Nordzucker, Tereos | Equity | EU-Startups; Cultivated X |
| Première Usine programme | €4.3m | Bpifrance, under France 2030 | Subsidy (“subvention” in the Grand Est portal’s account) | Bioéconomie Grand Est; Cultivated X |
| Prêt d’Amorçage Investissement | €2m | Bpifrance | Loan | Cultivated X; Green Queen |
| Total | €12.15m |
Less than half of the headline is equity. Bpifrance is on three sides of the table: an equity investor through Amorçage Industriel, a grant-maker through Première Usine, and a lender through the seed-investment loan. That is the structure we found in the two French fermentation rounds announced earlier this year, where the same institution sat on both sides of a $38 million Series A that was €25 million of equity. It is worth stating plainly because MAASH’s announcement, unlike those, does not present the package as a single round; the company’s own materials itemise it, and the trade press has carried the itemisation. That is the right way to announce blended finance, and it is rare enough to note.
Two of the five equity investors are sugar producers. Tereos, per Cultivated X, is supplying fermentation substrate and technical support; Nordzucker is the other. That places MAASH in the pattern we described in August: the mycoprotein producers that have actually built capacity — Enifer, ENOUGH, Planetary — did it next to a sugar, starch or ethanol plant with the feedstock owner as a partner. Carling is not a sugar mill; it is a petrochemical platform with a glycerine-fed process. Having the sugar companies on the cap table is the substitute.
Practical consequence. When a fermentation round is announced as a “package”, separate the equity from the grants and the loans before comparing it with anything. Here €5.85 million of equity is funding a pilot; the €6.3 million of grant and loan is what allows the company to call the same programme “industrial scale-up”.
12 m³ against 10,000 tonnes
What a 12 m³ demonstrator can produce depends on the organism, the titre, the cycle time and the basis on which the output is counted — wet biomass, dry biomass or protein. MAASH has published none of those, and we are not going to estimate a number the company has not. What can be said is what the sequence implies. In July 2024 the plan was to adapt the existing process and move rapidly to an industrial phase at 10,000 tonnes. In August 2026 the plan is to build and run a demonstrator first, and the chief executive hired to run the company describes the demonstrator, not the 10,000-tonne line, as “the pre-industrial project” she has been brought in to deliver.
That is a re-sequencing, and an honest one. It says that the site’s fermenters could not simply be re-inoculated with a filamentous fungus and run, which anyone who has moved a strain from a 12-litre to a 12,000-litre vessel would have expected. It also says that the 10,000-tonne figure MAASH has carried since 2024 has not yet been demonstrated at any scale on that site, and the two 30,000-tonne lines of the 2024 release have dropped out of the 2026 materials altogether.
The number to hold it against is the one the only large-scale mycoprotein producer publishes. Quorn’s owner earned a 1.4% core net margin in its best recent half, running plants that have been in continuous operation for decades. Whatever MAASH’s “cost-competitive platform” turns out to cost, it is competing against that.
Practical consequence. Treat 10,000 tonnes as an ambition until MAASH publishes a basis for it and a date. A buyer negotiating supply should ask what the demonstrator’s output will be, on what basis, and when the first industrial line reaches financial close. None of those three is in the public record.
What “existing infrastructure” is worth
The reason to buy a plant out of insolvency is time. Cultivated X’s account of the company’s reasoning says MAASH took the site “to shorten its route to industrial production by using existing fermentation infrastructure rather than building from scratch”, and the Grand Est portal says the company “mise sur les infrastructures existantes”. The Saint-Avold agglomeration had built three technical and administrative buildings on the site that MAASH inherited.
Two years is what the shortcut has cost so far, and the output of those two years is, in the co-founder’s words, “un projet crédible et exécutable” — a credible and executable project — rather than product. Compare the two other routes the sector has taken. Building new, Enifer’s €33 million for 3,000 tonnes a year remains the only disclosed capital cost in European mycoprotein, and it was built beside the feedstock owner. Renting, as Nourish did for its ten-tonne run, produces product in weeks and capacity in nobody’s name. MAASH’s route sits between them: it owns the asset, but the asset does not yet make the product, and the money to make it do so is a pilot’s worth.
There is a version of this that works. Ajinomoto’s Nesle site, which we looked at in August, is a legacy fermentation plant that found a new tenant in a different molecule. The difference is that Ajinomoto still operates its own site and sold a line, not a plant; MAASH kept ten people out of 46 and is converting a chemical process to a food one.
The case for MAASH’s approach
The counter-argument is that MAASH is doing exactly what a capital-disciplined operator should. It bought a permitted, utility-connected, Seveso-compliant site for 4% of its build cost, on a platform that TotalEnergies, the region and the state have all committed to redeveloping. It has taken two years to turn that into an engineering plan rather than announcing tonnes it could not make. It has raised a small, itemised package to prove the process at demonstration scale before asking anyone for the tens of millions a 10,000-tonne line will need, and it has hired a chief executive who ran commercialisation of a protein isolate at DSM and worked at a mycoprotein producer that has already built at scale. Its equity investors include the sugar company that supplies its substrate and a second one that could. Green Queen’s account of the company’s positioning — “industrial discipline, cost competitiveness” in a “more selective market for alternative proteins” — is the language of a company that has watched the consolidation of the last two years and drawn the conclusion.
All of that is true, and it is why the re-sequencing reads as prudence rather than failure. It does not change the finding. The 10,000-tonne first phase that was to follow “rapidement” in 2024 is now behind a demonstrator that has not yet been commissioned, and a Belgian company with a French plant is still an ingredient supplier with a pilot.
What we could not establish
- What MAASH bought, physically. Neither the court release nor the press coverage lists the fermenter count or working volumes at Carling. Metex’s 6,000-tonne design capacity is the only scale figure, and it is for a different product.
- The conversion budget. No figure exists for what turning the PDO process into a mycoprotein process will cost, at demonstration or industrial scale.
- The demonstrator’s output and basis. Not published. We have not estimated it.
- Timing. No commissioning date for the 12 m³ unit and no target date for the 10,000-tonne line appear in any of the August 2026 materials. The Grand Est portal says only that the unit “doit désormais entrer en service”.
- Whether the Première Usine money is a grant. The Grand Est portal calls it a subvention; Cultivated X calls it “support”; Green Queen calls it a grant. We did not find a MAASH-specific award notice stating the instrument.
- A unit error in one source. Green Queen describes the demonstrator as “12 sq m”; every other source, including the company’s French-language materials, says 12 m³. We have used cubic metres.
- MAASH’s Galactic connection. L’Usine Nouvelle describes MAASH as a subsidiary of the Belgian fermentation group Galactic; MAASH’s own 2024 release does not mention Galactic, and the 2026 release lists five “new” investors with no reference to a parent. Whether Galactic remains a shareholder after the round is not stated.
What to watch
- A commissioning announcement for the 12 m³ unit, with an output figure and a basis. That is the first number from Carling that will mean anything.
- A financial close for the 10,000-tonne line. If it comes, the capital cost per annual tonne can be set beside Enifer’s €11,000. Every year without it adds a year to a timeline that in July 2024 was described as rapid.
- Whether Tereos or Nordzucker sign an offtake, not only a substrate supply. Selling sugar to a fermentation company is a customer relationship; buying protein from it is the one that funds a plant.
- The EU novel food position. MAASH describes its strain as EU-approved; whether LoCylia is sold under an existing authorisation, a pre-1997 history of use or a new dossier decides which markets the demonstrator’s output can enter. The 15 May 1997 date, not the safety data, is the question to ask.