But if we can ignore the hopefully temporary hype the fact remains - we do all need protein, and where it comes from matters. Right now most of it comes from animals, which is a spectacularly inefficient and increasingly awkward way to feed eight billion people.
So when a company works out how to generate vast amounts of complete protein without animals, we should be curious.
Which brings me to a shed in Breda (NL) with three, twenty metres tall, chrome silos bolted to the outside. That's The Protein Brewery, a Dutch company that grows the mycelium powder they call Fermotein.
The name hints at the method: fermentation. They brew it, the way you'd brew beer, except instead of yeast making alcohol you've got fungi eating sugar and turning it into mycelium. That’s the thready stuff that mushrooms grow from. Add in some wheat syrup (a waste stream from the food industry!), tap the fungus off the bottom, dry it, and you get a powder that's half complete protein and a third prebiotic fibre. The rest is a scattering of the bioactive odds and ends that fermentation process generates.
Last month they finally got a big stamp of approval. After roughly six years of paperwork, Fermotein became the first whole-food mycelium ingredient approved for sale in the EU as a novel food.
Around the same time they closed an €18 million extension to their Series B funding, led by ABN Amro's Sustainable Impact Fund. That takes the total they've raised since 2020 past €70 million. That is a proper amount of money and a great milestone. Hat tip to founder Wim de Laat and CEO Thijs Bosch, because getting a genuinely novel food through European regulators is a slog most startups simply run out of money before finishing. Six years!
Mind you, it hasn't been a clean sweep, and I’d be remiss not to mention that whilst Europe is saying yes, the American FDA looked at the same ingredient and effectively said “not yet”. Flagging deficiencies in the safety dossier: design flaws in the animal studies, not enough data to show it's safe at the doses being proposed, unanswered questions about compounds with known anti-nutrient properties. Hmm.
The Protein Brewery withdrew its US application in February and says it's all straightforwardly fixable, that one of the problems was but a typo in the name of a rat strain.
Let’s hope it’s that simple, because...
The case for positive impact is genuinely good
And hopefully not too good to be true.
Making a kilo of Fermotein takes about three kilos of sugar and, importantly, not much else at all. The company reckons it's 25 times more efficient than producing animal protein, and two to three times more efficient than pulling protein out of plant crops like peas or beans.
No herds, no slaughter, a fraction of the land and water, and it eats a waste stream rather than a field. If we care about animals, and/or about farming that isn't strip-mining the soil, and the other knock on effects of hyper scale agriculture, this is exactly the kind of thing we want to see working at scale.
Substantially higher yields, but less intensive, less cruel and less wasteful. More of this, please.
So the technology is brilliant and the impact logic appears to be sound, but as with all new inventions, there’s clearly a long way to go.
A big machine currently pointed at a small future
If you read The Protein Brewery's story as they tell it right now, it's all about” active nutrition" and "longevity". Their hero customer is a large American supplement brand that wants to buy their entire 2026 production run, about 100 tonnes, and sell it in little 20-gram sachets you tip into a shake. The future being sold is, roughly, a slightly better protein powder for people who already track their macros and health via a smart watch.
I can see how they got here, and I don't entirely blame them. They nearly died when their lead investor walked away shortly before signing. The meat-replacement market they originally aimed for cratered, and the US demand for the healthy-snack angle was suddenly eaten by Ozempic, of all things. Who ever might have guessed that people on appetite-suppressing drugs simply eat less of everything? But I digress. When you’re a startup looking for product market fit, survival is important, so you follow the customer who's actually willing to place an order.
But survival is not a vision, and that’s what I miss
If this is a company that can actually make protein 25 times more efficiently than a cow, and has the first EU approval of its kind, and the biggest thing it's publicly reaching for is a longevity shake for fit boys, I’m worried.
Their mission is clear enough: grow protein without the animal, but the vision, the specific future they're inviting the rest of us to help build, appears to be missing.
To be fair, the founder does talk bigger. He's said that his job isn't done until every continent has protein breweries. But "breweries on every continent" is at best a scale target. It might tell me how much they want to make, but it says nothing about the future they'd use it to build. It might be a vision of their future, but it’s not a vision for our future.
I’m afraid that without that, they may end up an ingredient company that merely becomes a supplier of powder to whoever pays best. It’s their every right to do so, I just think that would be a waste of a great opportunity.
A strong vision isn't the corporate fluff that we’ve been fed over the last thirty years. It's the thing that helps pull the right customers, the best staff, and committed investors toward you, and keeps them with you through thick and thin. It’s something you can aim a company at for fifty years instead of financial returns for profit maximising shareholders.
Amazingly, they've built the harder part, a machine that actually generates a product the whole world needs. Now I hope they focus on deciding what it's really for, before they get sucked into business as usual.
So here's my question to them, and you dear reader, - imagine you have the technology to change how the planet makes protein at scale. What future would you actually want to build with it?