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Europe’s next wave of biotech innovation could determine how the continent feeds itself as climate disruption and supply-chain shocks intensify. But as Brussels drafts its Biotech Act in a bid to scale innovation and keep pace with investment in the U.S. and Asia, food barely features.

Leaving food out of the picture could prove short-sighted. Food biotechnology could redefine Europe’s food security and supply resilience if it’s given a clear place in policy. At NextBite 2025 in Brussels, Europe’s food-innovation ecosystem EIT Food announced the European Agrifood Biotech Alliance, a cross-sector effort to turn science into trusted, investable capacity by breaking down silos between research, industry, and policy, and linking science, regulation, and investment from the outset.

Europe’s Food Biotech Opportunity

Globally, biotech’s momentum has been led by health and pharma, where cell and gene therapies, mRNA, and AI-enabled discovery platforms have reshaped the sector. The same toolkit now extends into industrial chemicals and materials. According to EIT Food, the bioeconomy already employs around 8.5% of Europe’s workforce, a figure projected to rise to 24% over the coming decade.

Food, at the intersection of health, nutrition, resource efficiency, supply-chain resilience and low-impact production, could underpin a $138 billion global market within the decade. Precision fermentation, microbial engineering, cellular agriculture, and climate-resilient crops are moving from lab to pilot scale. For investors, this is less about speculative moonshots and more about building the infrastructure of the next food economy: distributed, low-carbon, and IP-rich. Yet food biotech faces hurdles that pharma has spent decades working through: fragmented regulation, uneven public confidence, and a capital bottleneck between prototype and production.

Food’s Missing Place In Europe’s Innovation Agenda

Consultation has just closed on Brussels’ proposed Biotech Act, intended to harmonize rules, speed approvals, and unlock finance across sectors, a competitiveness play to keep pace with investment in the U.S. and Asia. So far, food is referenced but not made explicit with dedicated measures, despite being one of biotechnology’s most socially relevant applications. Stakeholders are pushing to change that, but it will need political backing.

Europe still lacks alignment between EU and national rules, consistency across product categories, and interoperable standards for safety, labeling and scaling from pilot to market. The new food-biotech alliance’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) aims to address that by mapping research priorities onto those evolving regulatory routes so that product development and policy evolve in tandem. Without that coupling, the next wave of food biotech risks stalling between lab and market.

The Consumer Confidence Gap

Adoption risk in food biotech is as social as it is technical. The EIT Food Consumer Observatory report Uncovering Consumer Perceptions of the Upcoming Biotech Act says that Europeans are open but watchful. Acceptance of food biotech tends to hinge on four factors: visible impact, fairness in who benefits, trust in EU oversight, and a shared sense of urgency about food-system pressures. Consumers are most receptive when innovations feel familiar and useful.

Willingness-to-try differs by product type: roughly 43% are open to precision-fermented dairy, 35% to cultivated meat, 23% to 3D-printed food, and 26% to genetically altered products. Younger consumers are more positive overall, while skepticism remains higher in France and Greece. For European consumers, the question isn’t whether the science works, it’s whether they can trust who benefits from it.

Trust Not Tech Drives Adoption

As Jack Bobo, founder of Futurity and an expert in global food systems and policy argues, acceptance of new technologies hinges less on data than on who asks the public to change, why it matters, and whether the benefits feel real and fairly shared. He says,“It all comes down to trust. If you don’t trust me, there’s no science I can show you to convince you that biotechnology is okay. And if you do trust me, you don’t need to see the science.” Public pushback is often less about the facts of a given technology and more about perceptions — concerns over corporate power, labor practices, and control of the food supply.

Yet, as EIT Food chief executive officer Richard Zaltzman notes, biotechnology already shapes daily life in familiar ways. “This is not radical science every single time,” he says, “It’s similar processes used in new ways, we’ve always used fermentation to make wine and cheese. At the same time, it creates new opportunities for farmers through expanding revenue streams.” In other words, food biotech is not a rupture with tradition but an evolution of it, a framing that may prove crucial for public confidence.

That familiarity is both an asset and a communications challenge. When outcomes feel tangible, better cheese, beer, or enzymes, consumers rarely debate the underlying method. Concern rises when the process becomes the headline and the benefits feel abstract or distant.

Lorena Savani, director of thematic leadership – biotech and protein at EIT Food says that successful adoption depends on starting with recognizable applications and phasing them in gradually. Precision-fermented dairy, such as yogurt or enzymes, is already commonplace and easier for consumers to accept than more novel formats like 3D-printed foods.

Fairness must also be explicit. “Fairness is a prerequisite for consumer trust and policy success,” she says, noting that visible safeguards and benefits for consumers, farmers, and small businesses are non-negotiable. The Observatory’s report similarly recommends tangible support measures for farmers and SMEs, backed by independent monitoring of industry claims. Visible trust and fairness de-risk projects and lower the cost of capital. Absent that, money stays on the sidelines and Europe risks losing momentum.

Distributed By Design

Zaltzman emphasizes that agrifood biotech need not centralize production; it can enable distributed models that include farmers through shared equipment and new processing options. Such a model could anchor thousands of decentralized processing hubs turning fermentation tanks, rather than servers, into the continent’s next strategic infrastructure.

This approach could shift food biotech toward platform economics, where shared biomanufacturing capacity becomes infrastructure and local fermentation hubs evolve into distributed production networks. Supply contracts or ingredient offtakes could turn into bankable revenue streams resulting in financeable structures, not science projects. That would make adoption not only more legitimate and participatory but also more investable: a farm-to-fermenter industrial policy anchored in participation, not centralization.

Savani’s point about starting with familiar, fair applications applies beyond consumer behavior, its also a blueprint for scaling. It could create the social architecture for adoption, allowing new technologies to enter daily life through familiar products, trusted actors, and visible local benefit. That same principle, design for participation, could also define how capital could flow.

The Capital Gap: From Pilot To Plate

In 2024, Europe’s alternative protein companies raised $509 million (€470 million), up 23 % year-on-year with roughly half going to precision and biomass fermentation. Grand View Research estimates the global precision fermentation market could reach nearly $35 billion globally by 2030. European research funders are also active, providing €290 million in alternative protein R&I last year. These are stong signals of momentum, but not yet of scale.

Many European food-biotech ventures stall in the €5–25 million range however, too capital-intensive for venture funds yet too early for banks or infrastructure investors. This ‘valley of death’ mirrors what clean-tech faced a couple of decades ago, pointing to the need for growth-stage vehicles, blended finance, and public guarantees. The Alliance’s goal is to bridge this “messy middle” between prototype and shelf by aligning its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) with funders and operators.

Its four workstreams on innovation, funding, advocacy and ecosystem-building are designed to turn policy priorities into bankable, sequenced opportunities. From there, the financing model itself must reflect how food biotech scales: not through a handful of mega-plants but through networks of smaller, distributed assets, shared bioreactors, on-farm processing, cooperative or cluster lending, and the often-overlooked plumbing such as data and cold-chain that makes pilots reproducible at demo scale.

For investors, that could open the door to new asset classes, from regional fermentation capacity and contract manufacturing networks to green industrial real estate. Capturing even a modest share of a $138 billion global market will depend on turning research strength into visible, contracted capacity.

To unlock that next tier of capital, Europe needs clearer rules, capacity that investors can see and touch, and financial instruments designed for portfolios of smaller tickets, not just a few centralized bets. The Alliance’s goal is to connect those dots, turning policy intent into investable projects.

Execution Will Decide The Outcome

The broader ambition is to place policy clarity, consumer confidence, and scale-up capital on the same roadmap. The science is ready so what remains is execution: closing the policy gap with coherent pathways, the confidence gap with fair first applications, and the capital gap with tangible scale-up capacity.

The prize is enormous: a resilient, low-carbon food economy that could redefine Europe’s industrial base and export competitiveness. Without predictable rules, investable capacity, and public trust, Europe risks funding the science but watching the scaling happen elsewhere.