Alternative ingredients: an alternative for European agriculture? 

Chocolate bars with no cocoa. Burgers grown in bioreactors. Wheat varieties edited to survive drought. None of this is science fiction, it is a snapshot of where European food production is heading, driven by a mix of necessity and opportunity. The question is no longer whether alternative ingredients will reshape agrifood, but whether Europe’s regulation can keep pace with the inevitable transition. 

A health case that keeps building 

The nutrition debate has tended to fixate ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Under the recently published Safe Hearts Plan, the EU committed to developing a definition of UPFs and, on that basis, a comprehensive food processing assessment system designed to give consumers transparent, science-based digital information. 

However, focusing on processing alone risks overlooking what is actually inside a product: its salt, sugar and saturated fat on the one hand, and its fibre, protein and micronutrient density on the other. Processing is not intrinsically the enemy. It is also what allows fortified bread, fibre-enriched drinks or fermentation-derived proteins to reach consumers at scale. The question is whether the Commission will reflect this nuance in upcoming initiatives linking food processing to labelling. 

Brussels has known the direction of travel for years. The 2020 Farm to Fork strategy already promised a proposal on nutrient profiles and mandatory front-of-pack labelling, though neither has been delivered. And while the Safe Hearts Plan has reiterated the willingness to stimulate food reformulation, concrete policies remain stalled amid disagreement over labelling schemes. What emerges is a policy gap: the case for reformulation is strong, but the regulatory instruments meant to drive it are politically and methodologically complex. 

Cost and climate: the other half of the story 

Reformulation is just as often a response to volatile input costs caused by climate change, and cocoa is the clearest case. Futures prices spiked from €2,500 to over €12,900 per tonne between 2023 and 2024, driven by disease, floods and drought in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which supply around 70% of global cocoa. Prices have since corrected but remain roughly double their pre-2023 range. 

The same logic applies to specialty proteins. Lactoferrin, an iron-binding dairy protein valued in infant, sports and immune nutrition, has historically been scarce and costly to extract. Precision fermentation is changing that: companies can now produce bioidentical lactoferrin from engineered micro-organisms explicitly to solve the cost and supply problem, with the global market expected to reach $810 million by 2034. 

And lactoferrin is only one entry in a longer ledger: Europe already depends heavily on imports, largely from China, for fermentation-derived vitamins and amino acids. Building biomanufacturing capacity for functional ingredients is therefore as much a question of resilience and strategic autonomy as of innovation. 

Innovation delivers, regulation needs to follow suit 

What is most striking is how much of this is already being achieved through innovative biotech solutions. Companies are increasingly using precision fermentation and cell cultivation technologies to recreate the flavour, texture and properties of cocoa, by fermenting plant-based feedstocks or growing cocoa plant cells in bioreactors. Fermentation- and cell-based platforms are also being scaled for coffee, dairy fats and functional proteins, decoupling ingredient supply from climate-exposed monocultures. 

This decoupling is often misread as a threat to farming. Fermentation does not bypass agriculture; it re-routes it. The platforms above run on oats, sunflower seeds, fava beans and sugar feedstocks, and increasingly on agricultural sidestreams. For European farmers, the shift is less substitution than diversification: demand moves away from climate-stressed imported commodities and towards crops and residues that can be grown and valorised in Europe. Getting this framing right will matter politically, as the polarised debate on gene editing has shown. 

Regulation has been moving too. The European Parliament has recently given its final approval to the New Genomic Techniques (NGT) Regulation, ending three decades of treating gene-edited plants identically to GMOs. It is a significant shift, expected to support drought- and disease-resistant crops and improved nutritional profiles. However, a two-year implementation period now begins, secondary legislation still needs writing, and Member States retain the right to restrict cultivation – meaning NGT products are still years away from shelves.  

Precision fermentation faces an even starker gap: as of mid-2026, not a single precision-fermented egg or dairy product has been approved for the EU market, against at least seven cleared in the US since 2018. A familiar pattern has taken hold, with European-founded companies seeking first approvals in Singapore or the US and only later turning back to Europe. 

The European Biotech Act, proposed in December 2025 and currently under negotiation, was meant to address this friction by simplifying and speeding up procedures. However, its first iteration is overwhelmingly health-focused, with only limited amendments touching food safety and GMOs.  

The Bioeconomy Strategy adopted in November 2025 points in the same direction, explicitly covering biomanufacturing and food systems and committing to streamlined rules, faster approvals for bio-based products and a dedicated investment group to crowd in private capital. But it is a strategic framework, not binding law, and its promises need to be translated into the Biotech Act’s second package, expected soon but still unclear in scope. 

Is it enough? 

Demand for alternative ingredients is converging from multiple directions: climate volatility hitting commodities, cost pressure on manufacturers, nutrition imperatives, and the EU push for strategic autonomy. Taken together, these drivers make the shift towards reformulation and new production technologies inevitable. 

What is missing is not innovation: Europe has credible fermentation and cell-based ventures, and the NGT file shows Brussels can modernise even its most politically sensitive biotech rules. What the EU still lacks is a coherent and holistic policy framework to reward good reformulation with faster procedures and better market access.  

If the EU wants this transition to happen on European terms – sustainably, competitively, and without ceding ground to the US or China – food biotech and reformulation need to move to headline in Brussels’ innovation agenda, on a timeline that matches the one already being set by markets.