2027 · Hotel Palace Berlin
MEVO
Alternative Protein & Food Systems
Who decides what scales next.
The Thesis
Why This Programme
Who decides what scales next.
Alternative protein and precision fermentation are no longer frontier science. They are commercial operations with bioreactor costs, fermentation yields, regulatory submissions and supply chain architectures that determine whether a company survives 2027 or retrenches.
Capital has recalibrated. The hype cycle has passed. What remains is the harder work: getting to cost parity, navigating novel food regulation across four jurisdictions simultaneously and building supply chains that can hold from strain to shelf. The leaders making these decisions are not running on optimism. They are running on data, discipline and a shrinking runway.
MEVO convenes the leaders who decide what scales next — not what could scale in theory, but what will scale given the regulatory, financial and technical constraints of this moment.
The Through-Line
The hype has passed. What scales now is decided by leaders who cannot afford to be wrong.
The strain was selected by algorithm. The fermentation was optimised by predictive models. The scale decision belongs to the room.
MEVO is built for the leaders who decide what scales — not what could.
Conference Chair
Dr Uwe Gottschalk
Operating Partner; Former CSO, Lonza
Keensight Capital
AIO Feature · Day 2 · 10:30
Strain selected by algorithm. Fermentation optimised by predictive models. Novel food safety review across FDA, EFSA, FSANZ and APAC requires traceability — the strain was designed by AI. Scale-up decisions at 100,000 litres follow recommendations the board cannot verify.
The AIO feature asks who governs the intelligence layer when the scale decision belongs to a leader who cannot wait for the model to be independently verified. Day 2 · 10:30–12:00.
Strategic Note
MEVO leads with alternative protein and precision fermentation — where capital is flowing and where commercial decisions are being made. Cultivated meat is included in the community and the programme. It is not the lead. Funding is down 48% since 2024. Commercial reality leads.
Partnership & Sponsorship
MEVO offers a limited number of partnership positions for organisations shaping alternative protein, fermentation and food systems infrastructure. Featured keynotes, sponsored sessions and curated 1:1 programmes deliver strategic visibility in a room of senior decision-makers.
Day One
The Scale & Regulation Decision
From bioreactor to market — the barriers that separate pilot from commercial
The Commercial Reality Check: Who Decides What Scales, and Why Now
- Capital has recalibrated. The programmes still standing have survived the reset. What does survival signal about which bets the room should now make?
- The difference between what could scale in theory and what will scale given regulatory timelines, fermentation economics and supply chain readiness
- Why this programme focuses on decisions, not trends — and what the room is positioned to resolve that no report can
Uwe Gottschalk has backed, built and scaled biologics manufacturing businesses. His frame for MEVO is not optimism. It is operational discipline applied to a sector that has spent five years on promise and is now spending the next five on proof.
Four Jurisdictions, One Submission: The Novel Food Regulation Landscape That Determines Market Timing
- FDA GRAS, EFSA Novel Food, FSANZ and APAC regulatory frameworks side by side — where they converge, where they diverge and where a submission sequencing decision in 2027 determines your commercial timeline in 2029
- The AI-designed strain challenge: when computational strain engineering produces a production organism with no conventional regulatory precedent, which regulatory pathway applies and how long does it take
- What the Singapore regulatory model offers that EU and US do not — and whether it remains viable as a market entry point after the capital reset
Regulatory approval is not the bottleneck — regulatory sequencing is. The organisation that navigates four jurisdictions in parallel and gets the sequence right will reach market 18–24 months ahead of the one that treats each as a separate programme.
The 100,000-Litre Question: What Changes in Fermentation Economics at Commercial Scale
- Cost-per-kilogram at 1,000 litres versus 100,000 litres — where the fermentation process holds and where the economics collapse, and what the data shows about which programmes have genuinely solved the scale-up challenge
- Bioreactor design, continuous fermentation and downstream processing efficiency at commercial scale: the three decisions that determine whether a precision fermentation company reaches cost parity with conventional protein by 2030
- Where biologics manufacturing knowledge transfers directly to precision fermentation scale-up and where the analogy breaks — the hard lessons from trying to apply pharmaceutical GMP thinking to food production economics
The fermentation economics that make alternative protein commercially viable at scale have not yet been demonstrated at 100,000 litres by any publicly disclosed programme. The room contains the leaders who will either demonstrate them or write the honest post-mortem about why they did not.
Coffee & Networking
Capital Recalibration: What Investors Now Need to See Before the Next Cheque
- Fermentation funding is down. Plant-based has consolidated. Cultivated meat has retrenched. What does the investment thesis look like for a sector where the hype cycle has run its course and the remaining capital is demanding commercial-grade evidence?
- The metrics that matter: cost-per-kilogram trajectory, regulatory approval timeline, channel partnerships and working capital efficiency — where the bar has moved since 2022 and which programmes are meeting it
- Where the investment thesis is still compelling in 2027: the categories, the geographies and the technical bets that serious investors are still making
The capital reset is not a temporary correction. It is a recalibration that has permanently changed what must be true before money moves. This panel contains the investors setting the new bar — and the founders who must clear it.
Moderated by Dr Uwe Gottschalk, Keensight Capital
The Ingredient Partner Decision: How CPG Companies Are Selecting Alternative Protein Suppliers in 2027
- What a major food and beverage company now requires from an alternative protein ingredient supplier — regulatory clearance status, scale capacity, supply chain continuity and price stability commitments
- The partnership structure that has replaced the letter of intent: milestone-linked offtake agreements, co-development arrangements and the due diligence process that has become significantly more rigorous since 2024
- Where CPG R&D roadmaps have shifted — the protein applications that survived consumer testing and reformulation investment and the ones that did not
The CPG partner is the route to scale. Without an offtake commitment from a company with retail distribution, the precision fermentation programme has no commercial path regardless of its technical achievement. This session is the buyer's perspective.
Beyond Meat and Dairy: Alternative Protein in Pet Food, Feed and B2B Channels
- Pet nutrition as the commercial bridgehead: where regulatory requirements are lower, consumer price sensitivity is different and supply volumes provide the scale economics that direct-to-consumer channels cannot
- Feed and aquaculture as alternative protein markets: where the economics already work at current cost structures and where the regulatory pathway is clearer than novel food
- The B2B ingredient strategy that builds manufacturing scale using non-consumer channels while consumer markets and regulatory approvals mature
The direct-to-consumer alternative protein market has not developed at the pace the 2021 projections suggested. The companies that built commercial scale through B2B, pet and feed channels have survived the capital reset better than those waiting for consumer adoption to arrive first.
Lunch & Curated Networking
Computational Strain Engineering: What Changes When AI Designs the Organism
- From rational design to machine-learning-guided strain development: the speed and yield improvements that are now possible and the regulatory implications when the production organism's design history is fundamentally algorithmic
- Metabolic flux modelling, predictive fermentation analytics and digital twin infrastructure for bioprocess optimisation — where the data infrastructure makes the difference between a strain that works at pilot and one that holds at commercial scale
- The IP question no one is yet resolving: who owns the AI-designed strain, who is liable for the regulatory submission and who governs the intelligence layer between computational design and fermentation reality
AI-designed strains are entering regulatory submissions. The regulatory frameworks do not yet have a clear pathway for them. The AIO feature on Day 2 will address who governs this — but first the room needs to understand what it is being asked to govern.
Coffee & Networking
What Biologics Scale-Up Teaches Precision Fermentation — and Where the Food Industry Must Build Its Own Knowledge
- Pharmaceutical bioreactor scale-up: decades of hard-won knowledge about upstream process control, downstream purification and GMP compliance that the precision fermentation sector is still learning to apply
- Where the analogy holds: mixing, heat transfer, oxygen delivery and contamination control at large-scale fermentation are shared challenges with shared engineering solutions
- Where the analogy breaks: food production economics require a cost-per-kilogram that pharmaceutical processes have never been designed to achieve — and the engineering discipline that must emerge from food systems rather than being borrowed from pharma
The precision fermentation sector has been building on pharmaceutical bioprocess knowledge for a decade. It has borrowed what transfers. It now needs to identify what it must build for itself — before the gap between pilot-scale promise and commercial-scale reality becomes permanent.
Who Decides What Scales: The Commercial Triage Panel
- Not every alternative protein category will achieve commercial scale by 2030. Given regulatory timelines, fermentation economics and channel readiness — which bets should the room be making and which should it be exiting?
- The triage framework: regulatory clearance status, cost-per-kilogram trajectory, channel partnership depth and capital availability — scored against each major alternative protein category
- Where the room's capital, talent and infrastructure should be concentrated in 2027 — and the categories where continued investment requires a thesis revision, not a persistence bet
This is the session MEVO exists for. Not what could scale. What will — and who decides. The panel closes Day 1. The question stays open through dinner.
Chaired by Dr Uwe Gottschalk, Keensight Capital
Gala Dinner
Day Two
The Supply & Intelligence Decision
From strain to shelf — and who governs the AI that connects them
From Triage to Action
The Supply Chain That Holds From Strain to Shelf: Ingredient Traceability in a Multi-Jurisdiction Regulatory Environment
- Supplier qualification, batch traceability and ingredient provenance documentation for alternative protein: the supply chain architecture that satisfies FDA, EFSA and retailer supplier codes simultaneously
- What breaks in the supply chain when an AI-designed strain moves from a production facility in Europe to a formulation site in the US under three different regulatory frameworks — and who owns the audit trail
- The procurement strategies that tier-one food companies now require from alternative protein ingredient suppliers — and the minimum viable supply chain architecture that qualifies a precision fermentation company as a credible supplier
The precision fermentation company that cannot demonstrate supply chain traceability to its CPG partner will not pass supplier qualification — regardless of the quality of its protein. The supply chain is the commercial gateway. This session maps what it requires.
Bioprocess Intelligence: Real-Time Analytics, Predictive Models and the Data Architecture That Runs a Precision Fermentation Facility
- Continuous fermentation monitoring: the sensor-to-decision pathway that enables real-time process control, yield optimisation and contamination detection at commercial scale
- Predictive models for fermentation optimisation — where the model improves yield decisions and where it creates dependencies on intelligence the operator cannot interrogate
- The data infrastructure investment required before scaling to 100,000 litres: MES integration, process historian architecture and the AI analytics layer that turns process data into operational decisions
The precision fermentation facility that scales without the data infrastructure to govern it will generate unactionable data at volume. The AIO feature that follows this session will ask who governs the intelligence layer — but first the room needs to understand what that layer contains.
Coffee & Networking
AIO Feature · Advanced Intelligence Officers
Artificial intelligence is changing how we feed the world. The AIO bridges the gap in how we govern, build and decide.
The Strain Was Selected by AI. The Scale Decision Follows Its Recommendation. Who Is Accountable When It Fails at 100,000 Litres?
- AI-designed strains are in regulatory submissions across FDA, EFSA, FSANZ and APAC. Predictive fermentation models are driving scale-up decisions at 100,000 litres. Multi-jurisdiction novel food safety reviews require end-to-end traceability through a design and production process no single regulatory framework was written to govern. The governance gap is not ahead of this industry. It is operating now.
- Where the accountability sits in precision fermentation: the CTO who owns the strain design, the VP Operations who scaled on the model recommendation, the Head of Regulatory who submitted to four agencies on data the algorithm generated, the Founder who told the investor the company governs its AI. None of them have a governance framework that formally connects them.
- The AIO emerges from the commercial and regulatory reality — not the technology conversation. The investor asks: who governs your AI? The regulator asks: can you trace this strain to source? The CPG partner asks: can you guarantee consistency at scale? The AIO is the answer to all three questions simultaneously.
The funding reset of 2024–2025 separated the programmes that can answer hard governance questions from the ones that cannot. Capital follows traction — and traction in this cycle means regulatory-grade traceability and governance frameworks that the next investor round, the next EFSA submission and the next CPG partnership all depend on. The AIO is where those three demands converge.
From Computational Strain to Commercial Scale: What Is the Intelligence Architecture the AIO Must Actually Govern?
- The technical stack from computational strain engineering through predictive fermentation analytics to supply chain traceability — mapped across the scale journey from lab to 100,000 litres, with every governance checkpoint named and every AI-influenced decision point identified.
- Bioprocess analytics, digital twin infrastructure and real-time optimisation: the systems that generate scale-up recommendations faster than the team can verify them — and the architecture decisions that determine whether those recommendations carry regulatory-grade traceability when an EFSA or FDA novel food submission requires it.
- Multi-jurisdiction regulatory intelligence and AI-optimised fermentation: where the technical architecture meets the four-agency submission reality, and what the AIO must govern to make the traceability chain hold from strain design to consumer safety clearance across US, EU, UK and APAC markets simultaneously.
The AIO keynote named the governance gap in precision fermentation. This session maps the technical architecture that created it. The organisations that build traceability-grade AI governance into their scale-up stack now will not be rebuilding their regulatory submission when FDA asks who designed the strain and on what basis. Substantive technical content. No product demonstration.
Who Governs. Who Decides. Who Is Accountable.
- The CTO who designed the strain by AI. The VP Operations who scaled on its recommendation. The Head of Regulatory who submitted to four agencies. The Founder who told the investor the company governs its AI. None of their titles contain "AI." All of them are now accountable for decisions shaped by it.
- The 90-day mandate: governance charter, decision boundary definition, validation framework and accountability chain — four moves every alternative protein and precision fermentation organisation must make before the next regulatory submission, the next investor due diligence or the next scale-up decision
- The AIO is the strategic appointment that connects the commercial decision, the regulatory commitment and the capital allocation. It is not a technology role. It is the mandate that separates the companies capital follows from the companies capital leaves.
The panel closes with a 90-day mandate framework. The room leaves knowing what to do on Monday — not just what to think about. That is the standard the MEVO programme sets for every session.
Moderated by Dr Uwe Gottschalk, Keensight Capital
Lunch & Curated 1:1 Meetings
Your AI-Optimised Strain Failed at Commercial Scale. The Regulatory Submission Is Live. What Changes?
- 4–6 leaders per table. Chatham House rules. Single decision in focus.
- The distinction between a process failure and an AI governance failure — and how accountability is assigned when the recommendation and the outcome diverge at 100,000 litres
- The crisis response protocol for an AI-influenced production failure under a live regulatory submission — the decision tree the room does not yet have
The first high-profile AI-influenced production failure in precision fermentation will set precedent for how the sector handles AI accountability. The organisations that have rehearsed the response will lead the recovery. The ones that have not will define the failure narrative.
Coffee & Networking
We Evolve Together: What the Room Commits to Before It Leaves
- Where the supply chain, the regulatory strategy and the intelligence governance decisions made in this room align — and where the gaps are still open
- Three categories of decision the room can resolve now versus three that require industry-level coordination — and which organisations should lead each
- What must change in alternative protein and precision fermentation before we return: the decisions that cannot be deferred, the infrastructure that must be built and the leadership mandates that must be created
MEVO closes with commitment, not aspiration. The room decides what scales — and what changes to make it happen. The tagline is the standard: not "what could" but "what will."