Adamo Foods secures €10 million EU grant to scale mycelium steak as it targets price parity with beef

Adamo Foods has secured €10 million (US$10.8 million) in European Union funding to accelerate the scale-up of its mycelium-based whole-cut meat alternatives, as the company looks to move from pilot production to commercial volumes.

• Adamo Foods secured €10 million (US$10.8 million) from the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking to scale its mycelium-based whole-cut meat alternatives.
• The three-year MycoStruct project brought together 12 partners to support industrial scale-up and sidestream valorization.
• The company targeted price parity with beef at launch, with commercial products expected next year.

The funding, awarded through the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking under the Horizon Europe program, supports a three-year project named MycoStruct. The initiative brought together a consortium of 12 partners, including Bidfood Group, Bühler, TU Delft, and Bio Base Europe, to scale Adamo’s fermentation technology and advance its commercialization strategy.

The project focused on two core objectives: bringing Adamo’s whole-cut products to market at scale and converting industrial sidestreams into protein inputs, supporting a more circular production model.

The company has targeted a segment of the alternative protein market that has consistently resisted disruption. While plant-based products have gained traction in burgers, sausages, and other processed formats, whole cuts such as steak still dominate global meat consumption, accounting for the vast majority of the $1.2 trillion market.

“Consumers have been let down by the poorly textured, ultra-processed, or expensive meat alternatives which currently dominate the market,” said Pierre Dupuis, CEO, Adamo Foods. “And despite some progress being made, consumers still can't find convincing alternatives to meat whole cuts.”

“This is where Adamo Foods comes in, and this is the rationale for our product and technology,” he added.

Replicating whole cuts has proven significantly more complex than producing minced or blended products. The challenge lies in recreating the fibrous, anisotropic structure of muscle tissue, where alignment, density, and moisture retention all contribute to the eating experience. Many existing approaches rely on extrusion or layering techniques, which can approximate texture but often fall short under closer scrutiny.

Adamo’s approach is built around a triple-patented fermentation process that grows mycelium into structures designed to replicate animal muscle. Rather than assembling texture after the fact, the company develops it during the growth phase.

“Our proprietary fermentation process allows us to grow mycelium into complex muscle structures which are indistinguishable from meat,” Dupuis said.

He added, “Our fermentation process allows us to create very long and densely packed mycelium hyphae which mimic the complex matrix of animal muscle tissue.”

This ability to generate structure inherently is central to the company’s claim of delivering products that match conventional meat across multiple parameters. These include taste, texture, nutrition, and cost, without relying on extensive processing or additives.

“Our formulation technology is also extremely clean label: <5 ingredients, all fully natural, with a better protein quality than beef, more B12 and iron, 0 cholesterol,” Dupuis said.

The company has initially focused on steak, with plans to expand into other whole-cut formats. The emphasis on minimal ingredients and nutritional performance is also intended to address some of the criticisms directed at earlier generations of plant-based products.

After a period of rapid growth, the plant-based category has faced a slowdown, with questions raised around product quality, pricing, and repeat purchase rates. Many products have struggled to deliver on taste expectations or have relied on long ingredient lists, limiting their appeal to mainstream consumers.

“What went wrong is that brands thought consumers would compromise on taste or price because alt protein is healthier or more sustainable than real meat,” Dupuis said. “This is a trap, consumers don't want to compromise when it comes to food.”

That perspective has shaped Adamo’s commercial strategy. Rather than focusing on niche segments, the company is targeting the mainstream market directly, with pricing positioned to compete with conventional meat.

“Yes absolutely, we will be launching our products at price parity from day one (next year),” Dupuis said.

While production costs remain higher at smaller scales, he pointed to the advantages of submerged fermentation as a pathway to competitiveness.

“Our costs are still a little more expensive when we operate at smaller scales, but submerged fermentation provides very large economies of scale, which means we are already on track to reach a positive gross margin very soon,” he said.

Fermentation-based approaches have gained renewed attention in recent years as companies look beyond plant-based formulation to more fundamentally re-engineer protein production. By leveraging microbial growth systems, developers can create structures and functionalities that are difficult to achieve through mechanical processing alone.

However, scaling fermentation remains capital-intensive and technically demanding. Moving from pilot to industrial volumes requires not only bioprocess optimization but also access to large-scale infrastructure, downstream processing capabilities, and reliable feedstock supply.

The MycoStruct project is designed to address these challenges through collaboration. Each partner contributes specific expertise, from equipment manufacturing and process engineering to research and industrial deployment.

“Every partner is very complementary; they are all working on a different area of Adamo's scale-up and commercialization,” Dupuis said. “Our partner organizations have extensive experience scaling products from pilot to industrial volumes, which is exactly what they will be doing with Adamo.”

Alongside scale and cost, sustainability remains a central part of Adamo’s value proposition. The company reported that its mycelium steak delivers a 93% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional beef, based on an independently verified life cycle assessment that includes scaled production scenarios.

“This is based on an independent, externally verified LCA, which takes our whole process into consideration, including at scale,” Dupuis said.

The use of sidestream inputs as feedstocks is expected to further improve environmental performance while contributing to circular bioeconomy objectives. This aligns with the priorities of the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking, which focuses on developing competitive, resource-efficient bio-based industries.

The project has also received a STEP Seal from the European Commission, a designation awarded to a limited number of projects that demonstrate strong alignment with EU economic and environmental priorities.

Looking ahead, Dupuis suggested that fungal fermentation remains underexplored despite its long history.

“Mycelium has indeed been around for a while, but very few companies have actually been developing new fungal fermentation technologies, the surface has barely been scratched,” he said.

“Our process is revolutionary because we can control how the mycelium morphologies are triggered and then grown into specific muscle-like structures,” he added. “Because we naturally grow texture, we don't need any heavy processing or artificial ingredients to 'glue' things back together.”

For Adamo Foods, the next phase will test whether those approaches can translate into consistent, large-scale production. The combination of EU funding, industrial partners, and a defined route to price parity provides a clear pathway forward, but execution remains critical.

“This is a transformative milestone for Adamo and a powerful validation of our potential to reshape the global food system,” Dupuis said. “We’re not just creating another meat alternative; we’re building a scalable, circular bio-economy that proves delicious, whole-cut steaks can be produced without the animal and affordably.”

With a commercial launch targeted for next year, the company now enters a phase that will determine whether its technology can move beyond pilot success and establish a foothold in the mainstream meat market.