In July 2025 Solar Foods told the market that its accumulated non-binding volume commitments would, if converted, correspond to “approximately 50-60% of the full production capacity of Factory 02”. In December 2025 it described the same commitments, from the same four customers, as “approximately 100–120% of the full 6.4 kiloton production capacity of Factory 02”.
No customer was added between the two statements. The tonnage did not change. What changed was the definition of Factory 02.
This matters beyond one Finnish company. Percentage-of-capacity is the standard unit in which alternative protein firms report demand, and it is the unit investors use to judge whether a plant is de-risked before a final investment decision. It is a ratio, and a ratio is only as stable as its denominator.
Methodology
Every figure below is taken from Solar Foods’ own press releases and company announcements, fetched and read in full. Where the company states a percentage, we have recomputed it against the denominator that same release states, to confirm the percentage is internally consistent rather than assuming it. All four are. The change is in the denominator, not in anyone’s arithmetic.
Solar Foods is listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market Finland, which is why this is checkable at all. Most companies at this stage of scale-up disclose none of it.
The four statements
| Date | Release | Commitments | Stated as | Stated Factory 02 capacity | Recomputed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Mar 2025 | Two MoUs | 6,000 t/yr | “approximately 50%” | 12,800 t/yr | 46.9% |
| 15 Jul 2025 | Letter of Intent | 500–1,650 t/yr | “approximately 13%” (upper end) | 12,800 t/yr | 12.9% |
| 15 Jul 2025 | Same release, cumulative | 6,500–7,650 t/yr | “approximately 50-60%” | 12,800 t/yr | 50.8%–59.8% |
| 16 Dec 2025 | Factory 02 site selection | 6,500–7,650 t/yr | “approximately 100–120%” | 6,400 t/yr | 101.6%–119.5% |
Each line is right on its own terms. Read as a sequence, the commercial coverage of Factory 02 doubled in five months without a single new customer.
Practical consequence: when a company reports demand as a share of a plant that does not exist yet, record the tonnage and the denominator separately. The tonnage is a fact about customers. The percentage is a fact about the current engineering plan, and the engineering plan is the thing most likely to move.
What actually changed in the plant
The March and July 2025 releases describe Factory 02 in near-identical terms: three phases, “fully operational in 2030”, with “an annual planned capacity of 12,800 tons”. Both then compare that to the operating plant. March: “nearly hundred times the design capacity of the already operational Factory 01”. July: “nearly a hundred times the design capacity of the already operational Factory 01”.
That comparison is itself worth pausing on. Factory 01’s design capacity is 160 tonnes a year. 12,800 divided by 160 is 80. Eighty times is a large number and did not need rounding up to a hundred.
The December 2025 site-selection release re-cuts the same project:
- Factory 02 “will increase the production capacity of Solein from Factory 01’s 160 tons annually to 6 400 tons annually”
- Phase 1 design capacity 3.2 kilotons per year, expected operational at the end of 2028
- Phase 2 expansion to 6.4 kilotons per year the following year
- The Selkäharju site “also allows for the construction of a third phase, which would expand the design capacity to 12.8 kilotons per year”
The third phase did not disappear. It moved category — from part of Factory 02’s stated planned capacity to headroom the site permits. That is a defensible engineering decision. It is also the entire reason the coverage percentage doubled.
The December release adds one line that deserves to be read carefully by anyone modelling this: “The presented production volumes are based on already achieved production parameters.” Solar Foods is claiming the phased volumes are extrapolations from measured performance, not from a target. The October 2025 productivity release supports that claim’s factual basis, as set out below.
What Factory 01 has actually achieved
| Metric | Factory 01 | Pilot facility |
|---|---|---|
| Productivity | 1 g/l/h | 1.6 g/l/h |
| Energy efficiency (O2/CO2) | 2.7 | 2.6 |
| Design capacity | 160 t/yr | Not stated |
| Planned design capacity during 2026 | 230 t/yr | Not applicable |
Factory 01 started operations in April 2024 and, before a maintenance break in summer 2025, produced Solein continuously for eight months. In October 2025 the company announced it had reached the parameters enabling full 160-tonne design capacity, and said it planned to lift design capacity to 230 tonnes during 2026 by bringing pilot-scale improvements to factory scale.
Solar Foods also said, in that release, that “already before the maintenance break, Factory 01 reached production parameters that would make Solar Foods’ next production facility, Factory 02, profitable.”
That is a claim about unit economics at a scale 20 to 40 times larger than the plant the parameters were measured on, and no cost per kilogram is published alongside it. We have seen this shape before in this sector: the operating asset demonstrates the technology, and the economics are asserted for the asset that has not been financed. Our earlier piece on gas fermentation’s food-versus-feed capacity gap set out the Factory 01 numbers against Calysta’s 20,000-tonne feed plant; this is the commercial-coverage side of the same asset, using disclosures that piece did not examine.
The binding side of the ledger
Non-binding commitments are one column. The half-year report published on 11 August 2026 provides the other.
| Metric | 1–6/2026 | 1–6/2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | EUR 0.1m | EUR 0.0m | +271% |
| Other operating income (grants) | EUR 4.9m | EUR 4.3m | +14% |
| Operating loss | EUR -6.8m | EUR -4.8m | -42% |
| Loss for the period | EUR -7.4m | EUR -5.4m | -37% |
| Cash and cash equivalents | EUR 27.0m | EUR 12.7m | +112% |
| Equity ratio | 62% | 46% | +35% |
| Personnel at period end | 61 | 57 | +7% |
| Order book | EUR 0.2m | EUR 1.5m | -87% |
Two figures carry the story. Grant income of EUR 4.9 million is roughly forty-nine times revenue of EUR 0.1 million. And the order book — the binding measure, as opposed to the letters of intent — fell 87% year on year to EUR 0.2 million.
The company is direct about what this means for the second half. Its stated priorities include “selling production capacity of Factory 01” and “securing binding offtake agreements with large international CPG companies”. Factory 01 has reached its design capacity; the constraint named by the company itself is now demand, not throughput.
Practical consequence: for a would-be customer, this is leverage. A supplier with an operating plant at full technical capacity, an order book of EUR 0.2 million, and a final investment decision to justify inside the calendar year is a supplier with a reason to negotiate. For an investor, the question before the FID is narrower than the MoU tonnage implies: how many of the four non-binding arrangements signed in 2025 have converted, and on what price.
The financing that the FID depends on
In June 2026 Business Finland granted Solar Foods EUR 77.8 million: a EUR 39.6 million grant and a EUR 38.1 million R&D loan, tied to an IPCEI notification approved by the European Commission and intended for the construction and commissioning of Factory 02.
The conditionality is explicit in the company’s own text. The funding “is conditional upon the final investment decision for the Factory 02 production facility and securing the total financing”. It is not money in hand for a plant that has not been sanctioned; it is money contingent on sanctioning it and on raising the rest.
Alongside that, Solar Foods raised approximately EUR 25 million in a January 2026 directed share issue of 5,154,691 new shares, signed an exclusivity agreement with GEA — which also invested in the company — to negotiate Factory 02 equipment and services, and a development agreement with Fortum covering hydrogen production, heating, cooling and electrical infrastructure. It has appointed Vicus Capital Advisors to explore real estate investor options, a structure the company says would “significantly reduce” its own financing need.
That partner-and-landlord structure is the substantive news in the half-year report. It is also why the FID is not simply a board vote: it depends on two or three strategic partners committing capital to assets Solar Foods will use rather than own.
The counter-argument
The strongest case against reading the denominator shift as a warning sign is that re-phasing is exactly what disciplined capital projects do. Defining Factory 02 as the 6.4-kiloton build and treating 12.8 kilotons as site optionality is more conservative than the earlier framing, not less. It reduces the capital ask, matches the plant to visible demand, and makes the third phase contingent on the first two working. On that reading, December 2025 is the company correcting an over-scoped project, and the percentage moving from 50% to 120% is a side effect of prudence rather than a message.
There is force in that. It is also why the tonnage, not the percentage, is the number to track: 6,500–7,650 tonnes of non-binding intent is the same fact under both framings, and it is a large number relative to anything in gas fermentation today.
But two things sit awkwardly with the benign reading. The first is that neither the December release nor the half-year report flags the redefinition or restates the earlier percentage — a reader following the releases in sequence sees coverage double and is given no reason. The second is that non-binding commitments signed in the first half of 2025 sit against an order book that fell by 87% over the following year. Letters of intent that do not convert are a familiar pattern in this sector, and we set out the general problem in our analysis of alternative protein offtake agreements and, in a more extreme form, in an agreement to explore a four-million-litre plant.
What we could not establish
- The identities of the four MoU and LoI counterparties. All are described only as “international customers” or “a leading international brand in Health & Performance nutrition”. Without names, the credit quality and conversion probability behind 6,500–7,650 tonnes cannot be assessed.
- Whether any of the 2025 MoUs or LoIs has since converted to a binding agreement. Neither the December 2025 release nor the half-year report says so, and the order book movement suggests not, but absence of disclosure is not disclosure of absence.
- A published cost per kilogram for Solein at any scale. The claim that Factory 01’s parameters “would make Factory 02 profitable” is not accompanied by a unit cost, a basis, or an assumed price. Figures circulating in secondary coverage attach a euro-per-kilogram range to a 12,800-tonne Factory 02; we could not locate that figure in any Solar Foods release and have not used it.
- The IPCEI reconciliation. In December 2025 the company stated the maximum notified IPCEI grant at approximately EUR 110 million with approximately EUR 66 million remaining. In August 2026, after the EUR 77.8 million June decision, it stated the remaining amount at approximately EUR 21 million. Those three figures do not close arithmetically on the published text alone. The difference may reflect decisions announced between the two releases that we did not locate, or a difference in basis between grant-only and grant-plus-loan. We could not determine which.
- Factory 01’s bioreactor volume and current utilisation rate. Design capacity is published; actual tonnes produced in H1 2026 are not, so utilisation cannot be computed from the half-year report.
What to watch
The final investment decision, intended during 2026. Four months remain. The conditions Solar Foods has itself named are the total financing package and the strategic partners for real estate, hydrogen and energy.
The order book at the full-year 2026 report. EUR 0.2 million is the cleanest available measure of converted demand. If binding offtake is being secured in the second half as the company intends, it shows up here before it shows up anywhere else.
Whether Factory 01’s design capacity actually reaches 230 tonnes during 2026. That requires taking pilot-scale productivity of 1.6 g/l/h to factory scale, where 1 g/l/h is the demonstrated figure. It is a testable claim with a stated deadline, and it is the nearest available proxy for whether the scale-up assumptions behind Factory 02’s phased volumes hold.
Which capacity figure the next release uses. If a future announcement reports commitments against 12,800 tonnes again, the denominator is being selected rather than reported. If it stays at 6,400, December 2025 was a genuine re-scoping and should be read as such.