- Founded in 2022, Germany’s Pacifico Biolabs has closed a €7 million Series A funding round.
- The food ingredient supplier has developed a mycelium fermentation process specifically to be used in brewery tanks that are no longer making beer.
- It gives it an asset-light approach to alternative protein that it says will help cut costs and increase food security.
Germany’s food ingredient supplier Pacifico Biolabs has closed a €7 million Series A funding round to make meat alternatives in disused or underutilised brewery tanks.
Founded in 2022, the company is tackling what it says is a broken protein supply chain while also aiming to increase “European protein sovereignty” by using existing infrastructure to secure the future of food.
Based in Leipzig, Pacifico operates as a food ingredient supplier to food manufacturers, consumer brands, and grocery retailers. Its technology is a mycelium fermentation process that runs inside standard, idle beer brewery tanks, which removes the need for expensive, purpose-built bioreactors.
“The brewing industry faces declining beer consumption, leading to many sites having spare capacity as well as entirely closed sites. Our process has been designed specifically to work for beer fermenters, which was certainly a challenge, but one that the team have cracked,” co-founder and CEO Zac Austin tells Tech Funding News.
Austin, a previous McKinsey consultant in London who was then part of the British Cabinet Office Covid Taskforce and later held a leadership role at Berlin’s Razor Group, founded the startup with Washington Logrono, a biotechnologist who did his PhD at Helmholz Centre at University of Leipzig and led fermentation research at the German Biomass Research Center.
For Andres Mazanares, principal at Stray Dog Capital which backed the round, using existing infrastructure gives the company an edge. He says that its products are “affordable meat alternatives that are indistinguishable from their animal counterparts.”
“Pacifico offers a credible solution to a broken protein supply chain,” he adds.
Meat alternatives tend to be more expensive for consumers but Pacifico hopes to achieve cost parity via this asset-light approach, since it isn’t building new infrastructure.
Investors piled into alternative protein during the 2021 tech boom, but today it is far from the flavour of the month. Fermented proteins could account for around 4% of protein production by 2050, giving it an annual market of up to $150 billion, according to McKinsey.
Still, Austin tells TFN that fundraising went well. “Whilst the topic is less in fashion now, highly scalable businesses addressing huge markets with a great product championed by large customers who love the product can still make a great pitch to investors,” he says.
The Series A funding round saw participation from Stray Dog Capital, TGFS, Sprout & About Ventures, Simon Capital, FoodLabs, and a regional brewery partner.
The startup is going up against mycelium companies including Quorn, Enough, and Finland’s Enifer. Austin says his company’s differentiator is the quality of its products.
The cash injection will be used to scale production capacity to 200 tonnes per month. Pacifico will also launch commercially across its target geographical markets of DACH and the Nordics.
Currently a team of 21, it will make some additional hires to reach 25 by the end of the year. Recent additions include its first production team members who are working full time at its production brewery site. On diversity, Austin says that some 15 nationalities are represented across his workforce, which also has “an almost equal gender balance.”
It brings the company’s total equity raised to €10 million. It has secured another €1.5 million in grants.
