© MicroHarvest
MicroHarvest – a pioneering biotechnology company based in Hamburg – has demonstrated its ability to scale its current productivity ten-fold, producing up to ten tonnes of microbial protein per day. This significant milestone validates the company’s ability to produce sustainable alternative proteins in the quantities needed to meet commercial demands.
Using agricultural by-products as feedstock, the protein produced through MicroHarvest’s microbial fermentation process carries a fraction of the carbon footprint of traditional animal-based proteins. This makes the company’s alt-protein an attractive ingredient for animal feed producers seeking to lower the environmental impact of their products. As such, the company is already collaborating with several global aquafeed producers to validate the protein for use in salmon and shrimp feeds.
“Producers of feed and food face high pressure to adopt novel ingredients within 3-5 years but scaling these ingredients has been a bottleneck for the B2B ingredients market,” said Katelijne Bekers, MicroHarvest CEO, in a press release.
“While many biotechnology startups struggle to scale their production beyond small pilot volumes in the range of a few kilos, we’ve always successfully run pilots with 50-100 kg of product. In addition, we have also found a solution to address the urgent industry need to diversify protein sources at scale now. Our demonstrated process stability at scale put us in a unique position to actually match market demand in 2026,” she added.
MicroHarvest ran its first pilot trial less than 6 months after starting in the lab. Now, barely 3 years later, they are already demonstrating robust production at commercial scale. The success of this new large-scale trial has solidified MicroHarvest’s confidence in the engineering parameters essential for its planned full-scale facility, which it hopes will be able to produce 15,000 tonnes of sustainable protein annually by the end of 2026.
