New food hub for alternative protein development in the US

GEA is investing EUR18 million (AU$29.7m) in a technology centre for alternative proteins to meat, dairy, seafood and egg in the state of Wisconsin, USA. The new food tech hub will pilot microbial, cell-based and plant-based foods.

The US now has favourable regulation and an openness to innovative food technologies. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already approved cell-cultivated chicken meat in 2022 and last year confirmed that the use of precision-fermented milk proteins in foods is safe. However, when it comes to industrial production of alt-proteins, the market is still on the starting blocks, so GEA’s food centre is designed to help bridge that gap.

Situated in Janesville, the centre will include an end-to-end process line designed to allow manufacturers to conduct scaling and testing work without the need to invest in their own capital-intensive infrastructure. The 10,000 m² building includes GEA’s multifunctional fermenters or bioreactors together with high-shear mixing, sterilisation, homogenisation, cell separation and filtration equipment. The system can freely alter the sequence of the various steps and add or repeat process stages to test cultivation and fermentation strategies along with product synthesis.

Beyond testing and validating processes, GEA also intends to promote the training of biotechnology specialists in the building.

This is GEA’s second investment in a new food hub designed to fast-track innovations from the lab to commercial-scale manufacturing. Prior to this, the company opened its technology centre focusing on cell cultivation and fermentation in Germany in June 2023.

Image caption: The new food innovation centre on the GEA Campus in Janesville, USA will be used to evaluate processes for the production of new food on a transferable pilot scale as well as to test production using cell cultures and microbial fermentation in conjunction with upstream and downstream process steps. The facility will be housed in an extension to the existing GEA building. Source: GEA