When I spoke with David in March 2024, he told me about his plans to produce mycoprotein, a protein-rich biomass derived from sugar and sugar waste streams for use in various food and material applications. At the time, his company, Planetary, was building its first plant within the sugar mill in Aarberg, Switzerland. I asked him how things were going.
Our plant, the first industrial mycoprotein production site in Continental Europe and a global blueprint for agro-industrial synergies, was commissioned in 2024: all equipment was delivered and assembled, we completed the first upscaling runs, and we produced the first product. It then took around six months to reach industrial-scale volume and quality. By Q1–Q2 2025, we were fully ready with a commercialisable product and ingredient. From delivery to commissioning of a full-scale industrial fermentation site, with production within 9 months, is probably a world speed record!
We are pleased to see consistent product quality and have never experienced any contamination in the system, which is always an industry-wide concern. Once contamination enters the system, you have to abort production runs.
The initial hypotheses have been confirmed on both the commercial and technical sides. We are investing an additional CHF 5 million in the plant to increase output. The process is working as expected, with no surprises other than the usual growing pains and no unscheduled downtime.
Of course, given our strategic location on the grounds of a sugar mill, we have to adapt to its cadence. There may be cleaning cycles, steam-generator overhauls, or a break after a campaign. There may be operational constraints; however, the synergistic benefits, such as CAPEX efficiency and the availability of feedstock and utilities, far outweigh those restrictions.
Does the plant operate year-round, or only during the beet campaign?
It runs year-round, except perhaps for a few weeks during plant-wide overhauls. We have sized both the utility supplies and the overall infrastructure to operate during the campaign and the off-campaign period. In fact, year-round operation, especially the utilisation of installed assets during off-campaigns, is the synergy that makes this co-location so mutually beneficial.
What feedstocks are you using? Are you using white beet sugar?
White beet sugar is the benchmark feedstock due to its purity. From there, we optimise to realise the full potential of the sucrose value chain: lower-value inputs such as raw, thin, and thick juice, as well as molasses, work equally well within our proprietary fermentation and bioprocess platform, called Bioblocks (TM).
At full production capacity, the use of these sugar side streams and precursors can deliver gross margins on the final protein ingredient of well above 50 per cent, which, in the context of commodity production, is a gold mine, especially when compared to other sugar side-stream valorisation strategies such as ethanol production!
Starch-based feedstocks, such as glucose, as well as food-industry side streams, can also serve as highly effective and cost-effective inputs for our process.
Can you use corn? Would it be economically and technically competitive?
Hydrolysed corn starch delivers glucose—also known as dextrose in the United States. Many fermentation processes rely on dextrose as an input, and we can use it too. In fact, sucrose itself is composed of dextrose and fructose, both of which are metabolised by our microorganisms and converted into protein.
Given the business potential, we have identified a strong, synergistic opportunity in the regional sucrose industry. A few global players largely control corn glucose and dextrose. And whilst those generalist carbohydrate producers present a significant opportunity for large-scale production, we also see opportunities with local, family-owned sugar cane or sugar beet processors in the more fragmented sucrose industry. These regional champions often face individual challenges, and whenever our technology offers an economically compelling solution, they tend to move quickly.
Refined sugar may sometimes have a cost advantage or disadvantage relative to glucose, depending on the region and year. But as you move upstream towards thin juice and sweet water, feedstocks become extremely cost-competitive on a carbohydrate-equivalent basis because less energy is consumed to produce them.
In 2023, you were keen to produce high-quality protein. How does yours compare with other proteins on the market?
Quality has several dimensions. There is organoleptic quality: how the product tastes, looks and feels to a consumer. There is nutritional quality: how the protein and other nutrients are structured. And there are functional properties: how the ingredient behaves when combined with other ingredients.
On the organoleptic side, our mycoprotein is a three-dimensional product. It is almost like dough: you can shape it into different sizes and forms. That makes it extremely versatile compared with powdered protein. It is a bit like cookie or play dough.
It is also very neutral in taste. Pea protein has a pronounced leguminous off-taste, which can be acceptable but often needs masking. Mycoprotein is mild in taste: One of the world’s largest chocolate producers incorporated 30 per cent of planetary mycoprotein into its chocolate. Its master tasters could not detect any difference compared with normal chocolate. This allowed us to produce a high-protein chocolate without animal ingredients while retaining a neutral taste.
The colour is also neutral: bland, white and beige-ish. It can be coloured if desired, making it highly versatile.
What about the nutritional quality of the protein?
In the last interview, we discussed PDCAAS—the protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score —which reflects the nutritional completeness of a protein. Our mycoprotein scores 0.996. A perfect score of 1 is generally associated with milk and eggs. Beef or chicken score around 0.92; pea protein scores around 0.7; and soy is reasonably strong but an allergen.
Mycoprotein is the highest-scoring non-animal, non-milk and non-egg protein on that measure. In the US, any ‘source of protein claims’ must be PDCAAS-adjusted: protein content is multiplied by the actual PDCAAS score. That is a meaningful tailwind for our product.
Another benefit of mycoprotein is its high dietary fibre content, consisting of beta-glucans and chitin. In the context of GLP-1 drugs and shifting consumer preferences, this is increasingly important for promoting gut microbiome activity, cardiometabolic health, and glycaemic control, as GLP-1 medications tend to substantially reduce food intake.
Further nutritional benefits include longevity-supporting compounds such as spermidine and choline.
Given its nutritional diversity, we see mycoprotein more as a superfood or wholesome ingredient than as simply a protein.
You seem to have landed in a sweet spot. On the demand side, carbohydrates are under pressure, while protein and fibre are in demand. On the supply side, sugar companies face stiff competition from corn ethanol. Did you anticipate that?
Of course, it was all planned meticulously from the beginning!
More seriously, in 2022 we recognised that synthetic biology, and fermentation in particular, was having a major moment across food, materials, ingredients, pharmaceuticals and even energy. Many fermentation companies were emerging, but little industrial infrastructure existed to grow microorganisms in large vessels.
Initially, we aimed to be a contract manufacturing organisation, building a large plant capable of producing multiple products in bioreactors. But we quickly realised that no one would bankroll a $150 million facility at an acceptable dilution.
We looked for a more strategic solution and identified upstream and downstream synergies with existing industrial players. Microorganisms need carbohydrates, which come from the sugar and starch industry.
While glucose is commonly used in fermentation, Western Europe is heavily reliant on sucrose and sugar beet. We adapted our bioprocess to metabolise different parts of the sucrose value chain. This has made us competitive with glucose-based fermentation while creating a technical and business playbook that complements the sugar industry.
Do you have any other plants under construction or planned?
We have several partnerships underway. One is with the largest sugar and potato company in the Netherlands. Another is with a publicly listed company in India. We also have partnerships in the United States and other regions. Our strategy is to locate production either where production economics are particularly favourable, such as India or Brazil, or where consumer markets are especially large, such as the US and European protein markets.
How is funding going? Are there plans for an IPO?
We are currently privately funded and remain a private company. We closed a CHF 22 million Series A round in April, bringing total funding to just over CHF 30 million. The funding comprises a mix of equity and debt. We seek to use debt capital when putting steel in the ground, rather than using equity to finance physical infrastructure.
Looking ahead, Planetary is well-positioned to become a strategic partner for large food companies, commodity actors, food processors, or vertically integrated retailers. This position could ultimately lead to either joining forces with a strategic partner or becoming a standalone listed company.
We are not focused solely on producing mycoprotein, even though it is our principal commercial product today. Our infrastructure can produce a range of compounds, including other proteins, colouring agents, fats and lipids, and nutraceuticals. Beyond food, we are also exploring textile and fabric applications, as well as PLA, PHLA and broader plastics applications.
We see ourselves as a full-stack bioeconomy player. We operate the technology and license it to sugar companies and other carbohydrate and starch producers, rather than focusing solely on producing and commercialising mycoprotein.
In 2023, you said the bioeconomy could require one billion tonnes of carbohydrates per year. Do you still stand by that?
I would describe it as a potential rather than a forecast. It was based on a McKinsey study suggesting that up to 70 per cent of the economy’s physical inputs could ultimately be produced using synthetic biology.
By physical inputs, we mean the things people can touch and consume: food, materials and other products. If you convert that potential into a mass-and-energy balance, it could imply consuming roughly one billion tonnes of sugar to produce the projected output. That is around four times current global sugar production, which is about 250 million tonnes.
That scale could be reached only if a substantial share of the corn and molasses currently used as animal feed were redirected to carbohydrate production.
Is it correct that it takes two grams of sugar to make one gram of mycoprotein?
The exact answer depends on whether you are looking at wet product or dry matter, and it cannot be generalised across the bioeconomy.
For mycoprotein, 1 unit of molasses or 0.5 units of sugar yield about 0.75 units of wet mycoprotein. Mycoprotein is about 24 per cent dry matter, so this figure needs to be adjusted when comparing on a dry-matter basis. Different end products—wet mycoprotein, biosynthetically produced plastics, and so on—have different dry-matter contents, so the input-output relationship always depends on the specific application.
You won the WIPO Global Innovation Award in 2025. Tell me about that.
Planetary sells mycoprotein as an ingredient, but we also license our BioBlocks (TM) technology platform to sugar companies and other carbohydrate and starch producers worldwide. They can use our processes to build their own high-value protein-production infrastructure.
Because that technology is both innovative and proprietary, the World Intellectual Property Organisation awarded Planetary the 2025 Global Innovation Award. Only ten companies receive the award each year. It is a welcome recognition of the potential of our full-stack platform approach and of the economic and societal potential of our technology.
Who are your competitors? Are you competing for every deal?
In the narrowest sense—companies in the same region doing the same thing—we are fairly alone. A few other companies are looking to produce mycoprotein in Europe, but they are either not yet at industrial scale or have struggled with the technological foundations. Some invested in infrastructure before fully financing their plants; others failed due to persistent contamination during upstream processing.
In that narrow sense, we would like to see more participants, as it takes multiple parties to create a market. We are not competing in a zero-sum market.
More broadly, we are enriching food formulations and partially replacing animal protein. We are also developing hybrid-meat applications, such as supplementing 80 per cent minced beef with 20 per cent mycoprotein. Other plant proteins, such as pea and soy, also have their own roles and niches. We are not entering the market as a challenger seeking to replace every protein; we are creating new applications where our ingredient fits best.
As I mentioned earlier, sugar producers worldwide are under pressure from stagnant sugar demand and competition from corn-based ethanol. Are the producers pleased to see you when you knock on their door?
Absolutely. A fully functioning fermentation facility—for example, four 50,000-litre bioreactors—can consume up to 10–15 per cent of a host sugar mill’s refined-sugar output, depending on the mill’s size. That represents significant offtake certainty in a commodity market.
We also have greater pricing flexibility than a large consumer-packaged-goods buyer with multiple supply sources and margin pressure. Our mycoprotein delivers a comfortable mid-double-digit gross margin, which allows us to set long-term pricing and service levels with sugar companies and gives confidence that the sugar or side streams will be consumed and incorporated into our products.
Beyond feedstock offtake, the synergies lie in increased utilisation of existing assets and the opening of a whole new product portfolio, which can add commercial flexibility during S&D overhang, price volatility, and policy-driven constraints.
Have you carried out a carbon footprint analysis comparing it with animal proteins?
Yes, the impact on GHG emissions, land use and water use of mycoprotein vs other protein sources has been analysed. The current protein production system is rather inefficient, with 75% of land only producing 18% of global calories.
A kilogram of meat emits over 11 kg of CO2 equivalents, based on the average production of a kg of beef, pork, chicken, and lamb. A comparable unit of Mycoprotein releases 3.70 kg CO2e, a reduction of ~67%.
In terms of land use, 75% of global agricultural land is currently used for livestock value chains. A mycoprotein substitute reduces the per KG land use by over 80% (23.21 m2 of land per kg of meat vs 4 m2 for mycoprotein).
The most apparent impact, however, is the saving of 90% of water (0.53 m3/kg meat vs 0.48 m3/kg of mycoprotein). For comparison, the average meat-attributed water-footprint equivalent consumption per American consumer per year is 750,000 litres, or 5,000 bathtubs.
Mycoprotein is more sustainable not only than beef and chicken but also, in relevant respects, than legumes such as soy and pea. We produce everything on site in a bioreactor. The fermentation process can run on solar energy or cogeneration, yielding a regionally produced protein that does not need to be shipped globally.
That creates a much cleaner supply chain. The environmental case is important given the impact of livestock production, particularly beef production.
Where will future growth come from? Will it come through licensing plants, building plants, or expanding into other food ingredients or plastics?
We need to focus, but we also need to be ambitious. It is really about sequencing our ambition.
In the near term, our commercial priority is to develop a suite of hybrid meat products, ready-to-eat and convenience products, and high-protein/high-fibre applications for sports nutrition and a health-conscious diet.
At the same time, in line with product demand, we are expanding the licensing platform with partners in locations where production has clear systemic cost advantages—such as India or Brazil—or where consumer demand is high—such as Europe or the United States. We want to grow capacity in lockstep with demand and avoid getting ahead of the market.
Over the medium- to long-term, we will expand beyond mycoprotein into other proteins, fats, lipids, and plastics. We call this a ‘land and expand’ strategy: once we have partnered with a carbohydrate producer and built a mycoprotein production site, we can expand into further applications, including yeast, plastics, and other products.
What final message would you like to share with readers?
The bioeconomy holds enormous potential for the carbohydrates industry. The world is changing, and new technologies are enabling us to redesign the products we know through synthetic biology. These synthetic biology processes require carbohydrates as feedstocks.
The sugar industry will continue to experience cycles, policy shifts and evolving consumer demand. In the long term, we believe the world will need to produce far more carbohydrates than it currently expects. Planetary is here to help accelerate that future. SUGAR IS THE NEW OIL!
Thank you, David, for your time and input.
In September, I will publish The Second Edition of The Sugar Casino (Revisted), updated and with the best sugar-related conversations over the past ten years.
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