The alt protein narrative peaked somewhere around 2021, when plant-based burgers were in every grocery chain and the category was pulling in multi-billion-dollar valuations. Then same-store sales declined. Consumers complained about taste and price. Stock prices collapsed. And the tech press declared the whole thing a failure.
That reading is too simple. What died was a specific consumer brand thesis — the idea that you could charge a premium for an inferior product long enough for costs to come down. What didn't die is the underlying technology, the feedstock economics, or the long-term argument that we cannot produce protein at the scale the world needs using the systems we currently use.
We've been tracking alt protein as a category since our first investment in this space in 2019. Here's what the current landscape actually looks like from where we sit.
What the Last Three Years Actually Sorted Out
The shakeout was real but it wasn't uniform. Consumer-facing plant-based meat brands got hammered. The lesson there isn't that plant-based protein doesn't have a future — it's that building a consumer brand requires different capital efficiency, different sales cycles, and a different path to cost parity than the early entrants planned for.
The ingredient layer is a different story. Companies selling fermentation-derived protein concentrates, functional texturizers, and lipid systems to food manufacturers rather than direct to consumers have largely held their ground. They don't have the same margin pressure from retail slotting and promotional spend, and their customers — food companies making reformulation decisions — are less sensitive to week-to-week consumer sentiment.
Precision fermentation specifically has continued to attract serious capital. The ability to produce specific proteins, fats, and flavors through microbial fermentation at meaningful scale is now demonstrated fact, not speculation. What's still being worked out is the cost curve — fermentation capacity is expensive to build, and getting to price parity with conventional ingredients requires scale that most companies haven't reached yet.
Where the Interesting Work Is Happening Now
Three areas are getting our attention.
Legume-based protein ingredients. Pea and faba bean protein isolates made real gains in 2021–2024 and the technology keeps improving. The issue was never the protein functionality — it was flavor masking and texture. Several companies have made meaningful progress on both. We're particularly interested in non-GMO, domestic-sourced legume processing that can serve the food safety and supply chain transparency demands of larger food buyers.
Single-cell and mycoprotein. Fungi-derived protein has a 40-year history (quorn has been on shelves since the 1980s) and a genuinely different nutritional and textural profile than plant-based analogs. New entrants with cleaner processing methods and better flavor profiles are finding purchase with food service buyers who care more about food cost and consistency than consumer marketing. This isn't a flashy category. It's a durable one.
Aquaculture feed alternatives. Roughly 70% of wild-caught fish goes into feed for farmed salmon, shrimp, and other aquaculture species. The sustainability math on this is terrible, and the supply chain is fragile. Insect protein, algae-derived omega concentrates, and single-cell protein alternatives are all making inroads as feed ingredients. The buyer isn't a consumer — it's an aquaculture operation manager focused on feed conversion ratios and cost. That's a more rational buying process and a faster adoption cycle.
The Cost Curve Remains the Core Issue
For precision fermentation specifically, the path to broad market adoption runs directly through fermentation capacity and feedstock cost reduction. Current precision fermentation costs are roughly 10–50x the cost of conventional counterparts depending on the protein. Getting to 2–3x over is achievable with scale. Getting to parity requires technology breakthroughs in fermentation efficiency that some companies are working toward but none have fully demonstrated.
This is the honest investor's dilemma in this space. The technology is real. The market pull is real. The timeline to cost-competitive scale is genuinely uncertain — and it's been more uncertain for longer than initial projections suggested.
Our current view: the alt protein companies worth backing are the ones that have a clear, specific buyer for a specific application and a defined path to cost parity on that application — not a general thesis about replacing all animal protein.
What We're Looking For
We're interested in alt protein companies that have real food industry customers, not just pilot agreements. We want to see unit economics that close at scale, not just on paper. We want teams that understand food manufacturing and ingredient supply chains — not just fermentation biology.
The category had a hype cycle and the hype cycle ended. That's fine. The underlying problem — that feeding 10 billion people on this planet requires fundamentally more efficient protein production systems — hasn't gone anywhere. The companies that survive the shakeout and build to scale will have done so by solving real problems for real buyers, not by riding a consumer trend.
That's a different business than what got funded in 2020. It's also a more durable one.
