The first Swiss-based protein fermentation plant to launch in 2024

Led by global impact investor Astanor Ventures, planetary’s seed round also attracted further investors, including XAnge, Blue Horizon and Nucleus Capital, to support its mission of addressing the challenge of lack of industrial-scale bioprocessing capacity in the microbial fermentation industry. The funds will allow for initiating the engineering and construction phase of a flagship site in Switzerland.

The global population is multiplying, but the current food system is broken to sufficiently address the foreseen food challenges. Producing meat and dairy from animals has a negative environmental impact, making plant-based and fermentation-derived proteins a better alternative since they require less water and land and produce low greenhouse gas emissions. Proteins from fermentation, in particular, offer product diversity, paired with production based on local feedstocks. However, the fermentation industry has a bottleneck – capacity is not available.

“This restriction became evident in early 2021 when we saw first products coming onto the market, at pilot scale”, said David Brandes, CEO of Planetary, the startup aiming to fill the gap by providing bioprocessing capacity from upstream to downstream production and into finished product formulation. Incorporated in 2021, planetary and its team are building the first Swiss-based fermentation infrastructure and related manufacturing IP. Fermentation front-runners and brand owners (“originators”) will benefit from the technology following a contract development and manufacturing (“CDMO”) business model in the B2B space.

Starting operations out of their Swiss Manufacturing and Innovation Center, MiC, the company will enable microbial precision and mycelial biomass fermentation players to scale up and mass-produce tasty and healthy animal-free protein replacements at an industrial scale low cost – discussions with potential partners are underway. After Switzerland, the startup plans to operate a global network of automated production plants.

Leveraging the Swiss foodtech ecosystem
Explaining the decision to build the facility in Switzerland, Brandes says Switzerland offers a favourable and supportive food-tech ecosystem, paired with high consumer awareness, abundant biotech talent and attractive unit economies. “All of these reasons solidify our belief that Switzerland is an excellent launch market before expanding into further territories.”

Plans to launch the facility started a few months back following the vision of planetary’s Chief Science Officer and co-founder, Professor Ian Marison, an expert in industrial bioprocesses, mycelial fermentation, yeast fermentation with a rich career in biotechnology. He is supported by Muyiwa Akintoye (Chief Product Officer), leading the product side by turning raw biomass into delicious consumer products and Joachim Schulze (Chief Technology Officer), who is engineering the production plant, is anticipated to go live in early 2024. The startup is currently expanding its team to add 20 additional professionals by the year.

(Press release/RAN)
Phot L-R: Joachim Schulze, CTO; Prof. Ian Marison, CTO, David Brandes, CEO, Dr. Muyiwa Akintoye, CPO