Israel invests US$13.8 million in new fermentation lab to boost growth of alt-protein sector

ISRAEL –  The Israel Innovation Authority has invested US$13.8 million to establish a permanent microorganism fermentation lab for the food industry at YDLabs.

The infrastructure will serve all food tech companies using fermentation for research, development, and production of their products.

According to the CEO of Israel Innovation Authority, Dror Bin, the investment aims to see the Israeli ecosystem benefit from infrastructure and services provided at YDLabs for scaling production to enable economic feasibility assessment, regulation, and preparedness. 

“YDLabs will establish a facility that will provide fermentation services to food tech companies at varying scales, ranging from ten litres to 20,000 litres,” he noted.

“It will also offer diverse services based on the current and future needs of the local food tech industry, subject to predefined conditions set by the research committee.”

Dror added that Israel has identified the food tech field as one of the areas to prioritize since lack of infrastructure and workforce has forced many ventures to turn to service providers abroad, leading to early knowledge leakage and advancements in regulatory frameworks tailored for other countries.

“The fermentation facility will include equipment, human resources specialized in food fermentation, services enabling fermentation at pilot and demo scales, separation and purification services, analytics, assistance in food regulation and more,” he noted. 

In addition, he confirmed that the initiative will enable infrastructure customers from Israel and worldwide to conduct fermentation at various volumes, conduct economic feasibility experiments, produce small-scale batches for potential customers, establish a regulatory dossier, and create small trading batches. 

He assured that the initiative will bring change as soon as possible preserving the vast knowledge in Israel currently and encouraging companies to move from the development to production.

“The field of alternative proteins has experienced significant growth in recent years and is expected to continue its high growth trajectory in the coming years,” he noted.

Dror also added that the main motivations driving and accelerating the development of technologies and products stem from concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of increasing demand for animal-based proteins.

In similar developments earlier this month, GEA opened a Food Application and Technology Center of Excellence (ATC) in Germany, slated as a central hub for piloting processes and products for the alternative protein industry.

GEA said the research focus was turning to precision fermentation for milk proteins. One of GEA’s initial customers in this field is a scale-up from Israel called Imagindairy

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