Scale-up: the neglected bottleneck facing alternative proteins

Hi everyone! I'm Alex, Managing Director of the Good Food Institute Europe. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my post on why scale-up is so important for the future of alternative proteins. This is a topic we're really passionate about at GFI Europe, and one that's becoming increasingly important as the sector matures.

I’ll be around in the comments and happy to answer any questions. We really value feedback from this community, so I look forward to the discussion!

Conventional meat production drives deforestation, emissions, and biodiversity loss, and increases the risk of antibiotic resistance and future pandemics. On the other hand, alternative proteins offer a way to feed a growing population while reducing the damage caused. By producing meat from plants, cultivating it from animal cells, or producing ingredients through fermentation, we can create foods that taste and feel like conventional meat, but with a fraction of the impact.

Currently, though, many alternative proteins don’t live up to consumer expectations on factors like price and convenience. Years of scientific innovation have shown that it’s possible to make meat differently, but without the infrastructure to produce it at scale, these products aren’t able to compete with conventional products. 

Until we have the pilot plants, supply chains, and factories necessary to produce at scale, alternative proteins will remain niche products rather than fulfilling their potential as a mainstream solution to climate change, food insecurity, and animal welfare.

The Good Food Institute^[1] is a network of seven nonprofit organisations across the world, committed to advancing alternative proteins through science, policy, and industry engagement. We see scale-up as one of the most neglected yet critical levers that can unlock counterfactual impact for people, animals, and the planet, and one of the highest-impact opportunities for donors to make a meaningful difference.

At GFI Europe, our team is already working to ensure that alternative proteins can make the leap from labs to supermarket shelves. And with our knowledge of the sector and extensive network of relationships, GFI Europe helps unlock public and private investment to drive the growth of alternative proteins.

In this post, I’ll explain why scale-up funding matters and what GFI is doing to unlock it.

What is scale-up funding?

Scale-up funding is the investment needed to bridge the gap between research and commercial production, enabling promising innovations to be produced at scale. While research and development (R&D) funding supports the early stages: discovering new ingredients, demonstrating feasibility, and refining flavour, nutrition, and texture. Scale-up funding pays for the infrastructure that makes it possible to produce those innovations at a commercial level.

Before companies can produce products at scale, they need access to pilot plants, a crucial intermediary step between R&D and commercial production, where processes are tested to determine if what works in the lab can be reliably replicated at a larger scale.

Then, at a commercial level, factories are needed to process raw materials, like extracting and texturising plant proteins, cultivating animal cells, or fermenting microorganisms, followed by end-product formulation facilities where flavour and sensory qualities are refined to match consumer expectations.

Finally, robust supply chains are needed to source the right crops and feedstocks (the raw materials required for the production process, like sugars or amino acids) in sufficient quantities to keep production running efficiently. 

Scaling is the bottleneck that stands between the potential of alternative proteins and real-world impact, and it’s an area that is drastically underfunded.

Why scaling is the bottleneck

We’re at a stage where many alternative protein products are no longer just ideas or early prototypes. They’re ready, or very close to being ready, for large-scale production.

We’ve seen in other sectors that scale makes all the difference to uptake. Once production ramps up, costs come down, and products become accessible to everyday consumers. As with electric vehicles and solar panels, both began as expensive and niche technologies, but investment in scale-up infrastructure brought prices down and enabled mainstream adoption.

The same can be said for alternative proteins. This shift is a cornerstone of GFI’s theory of change: if alternative proteins remain expensive and exclusive, they can’t reach their full potential impact on climate, food security, or animal welfare.

The scale-up gap in Europe

Startups alone cannot cover the cost of scaling. For context, a pilot or demonstration-scale plant can cost between $3–15 million, while a full commercial facility might cost anywhere from $50 million for fermentation to $150 million or more, depending on the technology. For cultivated meat, the median anticipated cost of a commercial facility is around $90 million. These figures are far beyond what any early-stage company could finance on its own, especially as the median total funding for European alternative protein companies is just $4 million (Net Zero Insights (NZI) figures, analysed by the Good Food Institute (GFI)).

In Europe, our current priority is intermediate-scale facilities — pilot plants. Some do exist, but many are not food-grade or lack the specialist equipment required for alternative protein production. And when facilities are shared, which is inevitable given the current facilities available, companies often end up working on the same machines as their competitors, making it impossible to develop something truly different or better. This barrier is already slowing progress. In the fermentation sector, only 4% of existing capacity is available at the demo scale that most companies need, leaving a major gap between lab experiments and commercial production.

However, we also lack sufficient commercial-scale facilities, the large, purpose-built factories that can produce products at the volumes needed to reach cost parity. By 2030, capturing just 6% of the global meat market with plant-based meat would require around 800 large-scale extrusion plants and an estimated $27 billion investment, a sixfold increase in current capacity. Similar investment will be needed in food-grade biomanufacturing for fermentation and cultivated meat.

A lack of funding means that companies are forced to compete for the limited infrastructure available, with each start-up chasing opportunities for its own survival rather than building shared infrastructure that benefits the entire ecosystem. 

The funding imbalance

The vast majority of investment in alternative proteins is directed towards research and development. For example, in 2024, roughly 58% of government funding was allocated to R&D, compared to just 29% for scale-up.^[2] 

Figure 1: Graph showing the yearly public investment in alternative proteins by type.

That funding has been essential, enabling the sector to establish proof of concept, enhance taste and texture, and lay the scientific foundation for alternative proteins. And continued R&D funding is still necessary; taste and texture must keep improving if these products are to compete with conventional meat.

But the next phase, building the infrastructure to scale these products, is being neglected. According to the ClimateWorks Foundation, unlocking the full benefits of alternative proteins will require global public funding for scale-up and commercialisation to average US$5.7 billion annually, compared to US$4.4 billion annually for R&D. Currently, we are nowhere near this level of investment. Public funding for alternative proteins accounts for approximately 5% of what’s needed to unlock their full potential.

This isn’t surprising. Shiny prototypes and breakthrough technologies attract attention, while the pilot plants, commercial facilities, and supply chain investments that make them viable often go overlooked. Yet this vital infrastructure is what makes food system transformation possible. Without it, the potential benefits of alternative proteins will never materialise in the real world.

Funding the gap

To date, the majority of private funding for alternative proteins in Europe has originated from venture capital (VC). VC has been hugely valuable for early-stage R&D, helping companies bring ideas to life and develop their first prototypes. But it’s not designed to fund the costly infrastructure needed for scale-up, leaving a significant funding gap. 

Bridging this gap won’t happen through public or private money alone. It requires blended finance ^[3]– a partnership where governments step in first to share risk, and in doing so, open the door for private investors to follow.

This blended model is especially important in Europe, where private investors tend to be more risk-averse. Food companies also often operate on short-term contracts, sometimes as little as three months, and tend to operate on low margins, which makes it harder for investors to see a clear path to returns. Add in regulatory uncertainty, and securing loans for large-scale infrastructure becomes nearly impossible.

This funding gap is too big for individual companies to solve on their own. Closing it will require stronger collaboration between public funders, private investors, and companies. That’s exactly where GFI comes in.

GFI acts as an umbrella organisation, building the scientific, regulatory, and policy architecture that allows others to succeed. Unlike individual companies, our focus is on growing the ecosystem as a whole, creating the conditions for startups, researchers, investors, and governments to succeed together. We combine deep industry expertise with trusted relationships across science, industry, and policy, and we have a proven track record of translating that expertise into action: from securing public funding to shaping regulations and guiding investments. 

As a philanthropically funded nonprofit, every dollar or euro donated to GFI helps unlock much larger streams of public and private funding for the sector, accelerating progress that no single company or investor could achieve on their own. And because we’re a mission-driven organisation, guided by animal welfare, climate, antimicrobial resistance, and pandemic prevention, our work is focused on advancing the public good, not private profit.

How does GFI Europe decide where to focus?

GFI was explicitly founded on the principles of EA, and we only take on initiatives that we have assessed to be extremely high-impact and an excellent use of the funding entrusted to us by our global family of donors. These principles continue to guide our work today as we approach our 10th anniversary. We utilise the ITN framework, assessing importance, tractability, and neglectedness, to decide where to focus our efforts. This approach ensures that our limited resources are directed towards opportunities where GFI can make the biggest possible difference: those that are achievable, underfunded, and have the potential to create large-scale change.

When we assess new opportunities, we combine this framework with analysis from our programmatic teams. For example, our policy team prioritises opportunities by maintaining strong relationships with policymakers, identifying what’s missing, assessing what’s achievable within the current policy context, and focusing on measures that create long-term, structural impact rather than isolated wins. Our industry team develops projects based on insights from ongoing stakeholder engagement, focusing on closing investment gaps and making commercialisation more viable for the entire ecosystem.

Combining these perspectives helps us to prioritise the opportunities that are both highly impactful and realistically achievable.

What we’re doing in practice

At GFI Europe, we take a holistic approach to tackling the challenges that prevent alternative proteins from scaling. Overcoming these barriers requires a combination of scientific understanding, policy expertise, and industry insights, and GFI is ideally placed to bring these elements together. 

In Europe, two of our team members are solely dedicated to scale-up, but this work runs through everything we do. Our policy and industry teams both view scale-up as a core part of their work, with country-level policy leads engaging directly with national governments to unlock public investment and embed alternative proteins in national policy strategies.

To expand our capacity, we are currently hiring a Commercialisation Manager. This new role will work closely with alternative protein companies to identify their biggest barriers to scaling and develop practical initiatives and resources to help them overcome these obstacles. This builds on existing projects, like our recent analysis of commercially viable scale-up pathways for the industry, which helps the industry understand what successful scale-up looks like and how to get there.

A central part of our work is educating policymakers to view alternative proteins not as a niche interest, but as an opportunity to reach national goals on climate, food security, and economic innovation. Across Europe, we are engaging with both EU institutions and national governments to push for dedicated funding pots for scale-up, with a particular focus on pilot and demonstration-scale facilities. These facilities are vital because they benefit the wider ecosystem, require less upfront investment than full commercial plants, and are more politically feasible to fund at a time when many policymakers are still cautious of alternative proteins. Although this work is still in its early stages in Europe, we are laying the foundation for results in the coming year.

Elsewhere, GFI has played a pivotal role in connecting companies with large public funding opportunities. In 2024, in the U.S., GFI began researching public funding opportunities available to alternative protein companies and sharing them through our industry newsletter. This resulted in 12 food companies being made aware of a funding opportunity and going on to secure roughly $20 million in grants for infrastructure planning. This is work that individual companies simply don’t have the time or resources to do themselves, and these successes show what is possible in Europe with the right support, and why additional funding for GFI can multiply its impact.

On the industry side, GFI Europe is working to make the financial conditions for scaling alternative proteins more favourable. One of our key achievements in 2025 was the launch of the Innovative Financing Mechanisms for Alternative Proteins in Europe report – the first comprehensive mapping of financing mechanisms suitable for scale-up. Building on our global Funding the Build research, this analysis reviewed mechanisms that have proven effective in other capital-intensive sectors to assess their relevance for alternative proteins. It offered clear recommendations for both public and private investors and has already attracted strong interest from stakeholders. The next step is to focus on the most promising mechanisms and advocate for their adoption, so that these solutions can be translated into real-world investment.

Beyond this report, we continue to publish investment analyses that quantify the funding required for building the infrastructure Europe needs. And our team regularly speaks with founders, investors, and financial stakeholders to identify the sector’s pain points. This allows us to refine our strategy, align our recommendations with real-world needs, and make sure that the resources we produce are both practical and impactful.

Through this integrated approach, we fill gaps that individual companies simply don’t have the capacity to cover. We surface funding opportunities, provide expertise on EU novel food regulations, and develop practical resources like our scale-up blog series to help companies and investors plan more effectively for scale-up.

Founders frequently tell us how valuable this work is. Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat, said: 

“GFI plays a key role in building and shaping the alt protein ecosystem. Their strategic insights and deep understanding of the sector make them an invaluable resource for founders navigating this space.” 

Strengthening the ecosystem for scale-up requires coordinated work across science, policy, and industry. GFI’s role is to help remove the barriers that are holding back the whole sector, creating the conditions for alternative proteins to scale successfully.

What’s next for scale-up

In conversations with effective altruists, we sometimes hear there’s a perception that GFI is sufficiently or even well-funded. Or that there’s less scope for impact in giving to an established charity.

It’s true that donor support has powered our growth in team size and impact to date. And yet to sustain this mission impact and to strategically grow parts of our work, like eliminating the scale-up bottleneck, ongoing and increased philanthropic support is essential.

The reality is that every donation makes a tangible difference to how quickly and effectively we can move the sector forward.

Our current work is building the foundations for scale-up, but there’s still far more to do. One project we would like to pursue is a cost ladder analysis, which involves mapping the intermediate steps and hidden costs along the value chain. Currently, companies often compare production costs directly to retail prices, but this doesn’t take into account the important steps in between. With this insight, alternative protein companies could more accurately set cost targets and identify the most impactful levers for reaching price parity.

Conclusion

Alternative proteins have the potential to transform the global food system. They will cut emissions, lower the risk of future pandemics, improve food security, and spare billions of animals from factory farming. But that potential will only be realised if these products become readily available at scale.

This will require coordinated investment in the infrastructure that enables production at scale, from pilot plants and commercial facilities to supply chains and the policy frameworks that support them. Overcoming this is the next challenge for alternative proteins, and the key to fulfilling their potential for people, animals, and the planet.

1. ^{^}

   The Good Food Institute is a non-profit think tank helping to build a more sustainable, secure and just food system. We work with scientists, businesses and policymakers to advance plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation-made foods – making these alternative proteins delicious, affordable and accessible. By diversifying our protein production, we can reduce emissions, support biodiversity, mitigate risks to public health, and spare billions of animals from factory farming.

   GFI is a network of seven organisations around the world, all working towards the same vision: future-proofing our food system. GFI Europe is one of these affiliates, focused on advancing the transition in Europe by shaping policy, supporting research, and engaging with industry.

2. ^{^}

   The final 13% was allocated for initiatives that covered both R&D and commercialisation.

3. ^{^}

   According to GFI’s Funding the Build report, a typical commercial facility could be financed with roughly 40–50% long-term debt, 30–50% equity, and smaller contributions from tax credits and state incentives (5–10%) and concessional capital or blended finance (5–10%). When structured effectively, this approach means that governments only need to cover a fraction of total costs, but their participation makes the entire facility financially viable.

   

   Figure 2: Target financing mix for early commercial stage.