Section
Functional ingredients, clean-label reformulation and the supply agreements behind them.
Aeon launched Planet A Foods' ChoViva in June 2025. On 15 September 2026 it added three products made with Fuji Oil's Anoza M across 3,500 stores. Voyage Foods has handed exclusive B2B distribution to Cargill and left retail; Döhler has bought Nukoko. Cocoa-free now reaches the market through incumbents' channels.
Six brazzein GRAS notices have closed with no questions since March 2024, from six notifiers. Each used the same Renwick substitution method and fed it a different sweetness number, so the exposure estimates differ 73-fold. A formulator's inclusion rate, and cost per unit of sweetness, move by the same factor.
USDA's 3 September report has regular WPC 80% softening, with buyers split on a drop toward $10, while whey protein isolate holds at $14 to the mid-$14s. NASS data shows why: low-protein WPC output fell 37.5% year-on-year while the high-protein grade rose 10.3%. 'Parity with whey' now has three answers.
dsm-firmenich says its 70%-protein yeast can compete with fishmeal at EUR 3,000 a tonne and replace whey that has reached USD 25 to 28 a kilo. On a protein basis those reference prices are six to eight times apart, and the company has not said which one it will sell at.
SB1 is a bulk protein dosed at 10–20 grams per serving. Thryvia is made from the same bacterium at around 200mg. Cofounder Bryan Tracy says the constraint on the protein is the capital to build beyond the Döhler partnership — and the new ingredient fits inside the footprint he already has.
Beyond Steak Filet delivers 28g of protein per 127g filet. Beyond Meat has not published how much of that protein is mycelium — and the FAQ block on the product's own page says the protein comes from wheat gluten and faba beans.
The figures formulators cite for mycoprotein — a 5,320 Pa elastic modulus, 380-minute foam stability, a 12.80 m²/g emulsifying activity index — were measured on streams from the Quorn fermentation of Fusarium venenatum. Four other fungal biomasses are now cleared, with compositional specifications only.
A beta-casein made by yeast is not milk and, on FSANZ's own reading, does not meet the legal definition of milk. FSANZ proposes to require it be declared as milk anyway, plus a front-of-pack advisory, and says the UK and EU approach does not adequately address the risk.
EFSA's file on Rhizomucor pusillus biomass prints both numbers: crude protein from nitrogen, and true protein from amino acids. They are 10.6 g/100 g apart. Only the higher one is legal on a European label, and most microbial protein dossiers never publish the lower one at all.
GFI's June 2025 meta-analysis puts biomass fermentation at $4–6/kg against beef and pork at $6–15/kg. One is a modelled production cost, the other a market price — and GFI's own protein-normalised figures imply its fungal models span 12.5% to 54% protein.
USDA's WPC 34% series ran $1.52 to $2.18 a pound this year and is being cited as the reason formulators want precision-fermented egg protein. The grade that actually competes in fortification, WPC 80%, was quoted at $12 to $13 in August.
Human milk oligosaccharides are the precision-fermentation category that actually scaled. The four Western incumbents have never published a capacity figure. The Chinese entrants disclose tonnages, answered a price question on a stock exchange platform — and the price has roughly halved.
JOYN Foods says its frozen mycelium costs 25–30% less than the cheapest commodity beef in the US. Black Sheep Foods says its extruded wheat-and-fava protein is around 33% cheaper than beef. Both are specified by inclusion rate rather than protein equivalence — the inverse of how precision-fermented isolates are sold.
Leprino Foods holds exclusive worldwide rights to Fooditive's precision-fermented casein in cheese — and a non-exclusive licence everywhere else. Four companies have now picked four different owners of the route to market, and not one of them has an FDA no-questions letter.
The Better Meat Co disclosed offtake agreements and letters of intent for 33 tonnes of dry mycoprotein a month — then said it could not commercially supply large CPG brands until it scaled. ENOUGH and Enifer took the two available ways out of that trap.
Perfect Day's β-lactoglobulin and EVERY's ovalbumin are molecularly identical to the animal proteins they replace — and still demand a different formulation approach, a mandatory allergen label, and specifications the natural version never needed. A practical brief for product developers.