Ferm Labs Raises €3 Million to Scale Bioprocessing for Clean-Label Food Ingredients

Swiss-Italian FoodTech startup Ferm Labs has raised €3 million in seed funding to scale its proprietary bioprocessing platform and accelerate the development of clean-label ingredients for the global food industry.

The company is targeting a key challenge for food manufacturers: how to combine natural ingredients, strong flavour performance and cost efficiency at industrial scale.

Founded in 2025 by CEO Stephanie Lüpold and CTO Mattia Baroni, Ferm Labs is developing a new generation of B2B ingredient solutions based on high-yield bioprocessing. The company is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, with its production operations in Bolzano, Italy.

The latest funding round was led by CDP Venture Capital through its Green Transition Fund, part of the NextGenerationEU initiative. Other participating investors include Fund F, Redstone in collaboration with Euregio+ and Alpine VC, and food industry company Loacker.

The investment will support the expansion of Ferm Labs' bioprocessing capacity in South Tyrol, the growth of its European B2B sales team and increased R&D activity focused on new ingredient categories.

Using bioprocessing to rethink food ingredients

Ferm Labs is addressing a familiar problem in industrial food production: natural ingredients can offer strong sensory and nutritional characteristics, but they can also be more expensive or difficult to process at scale.

At the same time, food manufacturers are facing growing demand for clean-label products with simpler ingredient lists and fewer synthetic additives.

Ferm Labs' technology is designed to address this gap through high-yield bioprocessing. The company uses non-GMO microorganisms and customised fermentation parameters to produce functional flavour ingredients while aiming to significantly improve production efficiency.

According to the company, its platform can accelerate fermentation processes from weeks to hours while achieving high yields. It also uses low-value side streams as feedstocks, creating an additional circularity component within the production process.

This approach places Ferm Labs within a broader movement in FoodTech toward using fermentation and biotechnology not only to develop alternative proteins, but also to produce flavourings, functional ingredients and other components of the modern food supply chain.

Kokumesan: turning whey into a clean-label flavour ingredient

Ferm Labs' first commercial product is Kokumesan, a flavour builder designed for the industrial cheese market.

The ingredient is produced using liquid whey and is intended to deliver an aged-cheese sensory profile. By using an upcycled dairy side stream as a starting material, the company is combining ingredient innovation with a circular approach to food production.

The company is targeting the US and European industrial cheese market, which it estimates at approximately €68 billion.

One of the key claims around Kokumesan is its potential to reduce the amount of conventional cheese required in formulations. Ferm Labs says manufacturers can reduce expensive raw cheese inclusion from around 20% to below 1% while maintaining the desired sensory profile.

According to the company, this can result in up to 75% cost-in-use savings for manufacturers.

The ingredient is also designed to address practical manufacturing challenges. Ferm Labs says Kokumesan avoids fat and sodium build-up that can contribute to equipment clogging, while offering improved processability and shelf-life characteristics.

From fermentation technology to industrial food production

The significance of Ferm Labs' technology goes beyond one flavour ingredient.

The company is positioning its platform as an ingredient engine that can be adapted to additional applications and product categories. The new funding will allow the startup to expand its R&D team and develop products beyond its initial cheese-focused application.

This scalability is particularly relevant to the European FoodTech ecosystem.

Fermentation has traditionally been associated with products such as bread, beer, wine and dairy cultures. Advances in industrial biotechnology are now enabling companies to use microorganisms as highly controlled production systems for specific molecules and functional ingredients.

For food manufacturers, the attraction is not only the ability to create new products. Bioprocessing can also provide alternative routes to ingredients that are expensive, resource-intensive or difficult to produce using conventional methods.

Ferm Labs' model combines this biotechnology approach with a B2B strategy focused on integration into existing food manufacturing processes.

Why clean-label ingredients matter

Clean-label food has become an increasingly important consideration for manufacturers responding to changing consumer expectations.

Consumers are paying closer attention to ingredient lists, while food companies are looking for formulations that can meet demands for naturalness without compromising taste, functionality or cost.

This creates a difficult balancing act.

Natural ingredients can sometimes carry a cost premium, while synthetic alternatives may be less attractive from a consumer or regulatory perspective. Ferm Labs is attempting to address this trade-off by using high-yield bioprocessing to produce natural flavour solutions more efficiently.

The company's approach illustrates how FoodTech is increasingly moving from the development of alternative foods toward the transformation of the underlying ingredient supply chain.

Building Europe's next generation of FoodTech infrastructure

The €3 million investment also highlights growing investor interest in European biotechnology and sustainable food production.

CDP Venture Capital's Green Transition Fund is specifically focused on technologies supporting the transition toward a more sustainable economy. Its investment in Ferm Labs provides capital for a company working at the intersection of biotechnology, food manufacturing, circularity and industrial efficiency.

For Ferm Labs, the immediate priority is scaling.

The company plans to increase production capacity in South Tyrol, expand its European B2B commercial operation and accelerate the development of new products.

If successful, its model could demonstrate how fermentation-based ingredient platforms can move beyond pilot-scale innovation and become commercially relevant tools for large food manufacturers.

The next phase of food innovation

Ferm Labs' funding round is a sign of how the FoodTech sector is evolving.

The next generation of food innovation is not necessarily about replacing entire food categories. Increasingly, startups are targeting specific bottlenecks in the food value chain: ingredients, flavour, processing, cost, waste and resource efficiency.

Ferm Labs is tackling several of these challenges simultaneously.

Its combination of fermentation technology, side-stream utilisation and clean-label ingredient development creates a model that connects biotechnology with practical food manufacturing needs.

The company's first product, Kokumesan, provides an initial application. The larger opportunity lies in whether the underlying bioprocessing platform can be extended to additional ingredients and food categories.

With €3 million in new capital and plans to expand both manufacturing and R&D, Ferm Labs is now entering the next stage of its development: turning a promising bioprocessing technology into a scalable European FoodTech business.

Source: EUBizNews / Ferm Labs. Read the original article

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