Alternative proteins

Yet the rearing of animals for food raises significant environmental and ethical concerns. As a result, consumer preferences are shifting towards sustainable and non-animal protein sources. As a result, alternative protein-based food markets are projected to grow to £6.8 billion by 2025 in the UK and Europe alone.

Innovative companies are now using plants as micro-factories to produce plant-based proteins. Elsewhere, they're using various fermentation techniques to help produce the quantities of protein needed to meet growing global food requirements in a sustainable and cost-effective manner. Whilst these two methods produce an alternative to meat, genuine animal meat can be created by cultivating animal cells, which replicate both the sensory and nutritional profiles of conventional meat.

What's challenging about commercialising novel food innovations?

For many alternative protein companies, scaling up the technologies they’ve developed is a major challenge. Aside from the technical aspects of this, gaining the investment and funding required to scale can be a difficult and lengthy process. Another challenge is in ensuring that the techno-economic viability of these technologies is competitive alongside more well-established methods of production, whilst also considering sustainability requirements. Plus, gaining a clear understanding of the regulatory landscapes, which can vary by region and product, requires expert insights that are often difficult to obtain.

How is CPI enabling novel food solutions?

At CPI, we support companies to overcome Novel Food challenges by providing access to our food-grade facilities and expertise. We’ve been awarded a globally recognised certification for food safety, FSSC22000, enabling companies to take forward materials produced at our Novel Food Innovation Centre for consumer testing.

Our food-grade pilot-scale facilities (commissioning in late 2024) can produce up to 400L, while our food-grade lab-scale facilities are available now for up to 50L and are fully regulatory compliant with HACCP and Quality teams.

We’re experts in every aspect of scale-up for alternative protein production using fermentation, and we can guide you every step of the way, from ensuring that your host strain is suitable for large-scale production to the formulation of complex solids and liquids from raw materials. We can help you develop purified, stable products to ensure your product is delivered to the right place at the right time.

We provide desk-based consultancy with technical appraisal of R&D plans, market assessment, scale-up plans, economic viability of processes, and life cycle analysis, all of which can give you and your investors or funders confidence in your route to market.

We can support you with host strain selection, optimisation and development across a wide range of hosts including bacteria, yeast, algae and filamentous fungi as well as plant cell culture.

We work with both traditional product reformulation and new product development, addressing key challenges in alternative proteins like:

• Flavour and texture: Designing formulations to match traditional proteins, including masking undesirable flavours like earthy or bitter notes.
• Functional properties: Enhancing protein properties like solubility, emulsification, and gelling through enzymatic treatment and additives.
• Nutritional profile: Overcoming limitations in alternative proteins by using multiple sources, fortification, and processing to improve digestibility and nutrient uptake.
• Consumer perception: Ensuring sensory, nutritional performance, and environmental claims match those of traditional proteins.

We offer formulation design with advanced tools, including automated robots, data science, and comprehensive characterisation techniques. We specialise in process design and scalable solutions, ensuring optimised products are economically and sustainably scaled for market.

Our use of high-throughput screening and selection by design of experiments ensures we accelerate process development projects and reduce development time. We’re also skilled in process optimisation through the identification of variables that influence product specifications, ensuring that these are adequately controlled throughout scale-up. In addition to products produced through fermentation, we also use cell-based technologies to produce cultivated meat and other cell-based products.

Ensuring that you have the optimum scale-up route, which is sustainable, robust, safe and profitable, is hugely important to us. Through our process modelling, engineering and safety expertise, we can predict performance across various scales of operation using multiphysics modelling, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), discrete element methods (DEM), and finite element analysis (FEA). Our process engineers can help to design, build and operate multi-tonne gas fermentation facilities safely for processes using carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and hydrogen with up to 10L or 10 bar pressure.

Our open-access facilities, which run from lab-scale (1mL – 50L)  to pilot scale (125L – 2000L) to demonstration scale (10,000L), are available for proof of concept and feasibility projects as well as for process development and for contract manufacturing projects.

Last but by no means least, our downstream processing facilities across lab, pilot, and demonstration scales and our vast experience in isolating, separating, extracting and purifying a wide range of products will help you meet both yield and purity requirements.