MOA Foodtech's EIC Accelerator Ferments Factory Leftovers

A food factory's starch-rich side streams are usually downcycled into animal feed or thrown away. MOA Foodtech, founded in Navarre in 2020, ferments them into food ingredients instead, using an AI tool it calls Albatros to pick the right microorganism for each by-product, with pre-approved, non-GMO organisms in both biomass and precision fermentation. The resulting microbial biomass, the company says, is nutritious, digestible and non-allergenic.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance under the challenge for food from precision fermentation and algae, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,258,016 from June 2025 to May 2027 to scale production and commercialisation. Unusually for this cut-off, the project also reports existing commercial traction: 27 pilot projects and five licence agreements, with Nestlé and Barilla named.

Selling a process, not just a protein

MOA's commercial design is what distinguishes it from most fermentation start-ups. Rather than only selling its own ingredients, it sells MOA Box, a four-phase service for a food company's own side streams: define the ingredient and design the process with the AI tool, pilot at laboratory scale, model the economics and validate at larger scale with regulatory work and application testing, then industrialise either at MOA's facility or a contract manufacturer and launch. The customer can use the ingredient in its own products or sell it. The company claims five times faster research cycles and up to 70% lower cost than the alternative.

That structure is the setting for the licence agreements the company reports. For a company the size of Nestlé or Barilla, licensing a process to convert its own waste is a smaller decision than buying a new protein, and MOA can claim premium ingredients already produced at industrial scale without publishing volumes of its own.

The numbers, and whose they are

The project's market framing is the standard one for this sector: 9.2 billion people by 2050, protein demand up 70%, agriculture on 77% of farmland and up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, a €511 billion food ingredients market with a serviceable segment of €516 million in Europe and North America. The company's own site puts the functional ingredients market above $165 billion by 2029.

What is not public is MOA's own performance: no revenue, no production volume, no named ingredient launch from the five licences. Its news page is a list of grant programmes and corporate notices, including an extraordinary shareholders meeting called for 21 July 2026 to approve the 2025 accounts and capital increases. CORDIS shows no periodic report.

1. Working fermentation platformIn use27 pilot projects reported in the project summary.
2. Commercial agreementsFive licencesNestlé and Barilla named; terms not disclosed.
3. Scale-up of productionFundedThe purpose of the EIC grant; no new capacity announced.
4. €12.5M of EIC Fund equityNot announcedRequested in the application.

Grants from every level of government

Before the EIC grant, MOA had €4.26 million of venture capital and €1.928 million of grants, with Barilla and ICOS Capital among its investors and €674,000 from CDTI's Innvierte fund alongside Swanlaab's agrifood fund. Its public support since reads like a map of European funding: a Navarre regional competitiveness grant, Spain's PERTE agrifood programme financed by NextGenerationEU, a Horizon Europe project called PROMISEANG on proteins from marine resources and industrial by-products, and the EIC Accelerator. The €12.5 million of EIC Fund equity it asked for has not been announced as invested.

Waste is the cheapest feedstock Europe has

Fermentation companies that buy sugar compete on commodity costs they cannot control. Starting from a food factory's own waste changes that arithmetic, and it fits two European policy aims at once: circular economy rules that penalise disposal, and protein supply that does not depend on imported soy. That is why MOA has been able to stack regional, national and EU funding on the same technology, and why the customer for its service is the food industry itself rather than a consumer brand.