Mycofeast Buys Daisy Lab in a Bid to Brew the Dairy Industry's Priciest Protein

The deal

British industrial biotechnology firm Mycofeast announced on October 14 that it has acquired Daisy Lab, the Auckland startup that engineers yeast to brew bioidentical dairy proteins. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The logic is straightforward. Daisy Lab contributes the science: proprietary strain platforms, a high-yielding bovine lactoferrin program, and a scientific team that will stay on through the transition. Mycofeast contributes the scale: a 16-million-litre fermentation plant in Europe, a California R&D subsidiary called Evolutia Bio that pairs AI-led discovery with high-throughput screening and genetic engineering, and an existing portfolio of carotenoids and functional ingredients. Daisy Lab co-founder and CEO Irina Miller confirmed there are no layoffs associated with the acquisition.

The deal gives Mycofeast a presence in Asia-Pacific and puts Daisy Lab's founders into technical roles across the wider group. Miller said the acquisition was not born of a formal sales process: the two companies had been working together as potential partner and customer, and with capital markets for food tech still tight, the conversations moved naturally toward a takeover.

Why lactoferrin

Lactoferrin is a glycoprotein found in bovine colostrum and human milk, valued for its iron-regulating properties. It shows up in premium infant formula, clinical nutrition and functional supplements, and purified bovine lactoferrin wholesales for roughly 600 to 2,000 dollars per kilogram.

That price reflects how hard the ingredient is to extract from a cow. Conventional production requires on the order of 10,000 litres of raw milk to isolate a single kilogram of native lactoferrin through chromatographic resin columns. It is a high-value, low-volume ingredient, which is exactly the profile where precision fermentation economics make sense: engineered microbes brew the protein in a tank, no cow required, at a fraction of the extraction cost.

Daisy Lab, founded by Dr. Nikki Freed, Miller and Emily McIsaac, built its platform around this arithmetic. Its optimized yeast strains produce whey proteins including beta-lactoglobulin and lactoferrin, and in the first quarter of 2026 the company installed a 500-litre fermenter at its Auckland site to scale up fermentation and downstream processing. The team has also produced recombinant human lactoferrin at lab scale, though that program was paused late last year while the larger fermenter went in.

The sector has no shortage of exceptional science. The harder problem is connecting that science with industrial manufacturing, capital and commercial markets quickly enough, and with economics that actually work.

Witek Hruzewicz, CEO of Mycofeast

A sector that is consolidating

The acquisition is the latest example of consolidation sweeping the alternative protein ecosystem. Since September 2024, more than 90 companies in the space have merged, been acquired, gone bankrupt or ceased operations, squeezed by long fundraising cycles and the punishing cost of scaling bioprocesses.

The pattern is familiar. The science works: Daisy Lab has regulatory approvals from New Zealand's Environmental Protection Authority for contained yeast cultivation and demonstrated scale-up capability. But the journey from benchtop to commercial pilot means sanitary centrifuges, tangential flow filtration units and sterile spray dryers, each a multi-million-dollar capital outlay. For a standalone startup, that infrastructure bill arrives years before revenue. For an industrial biotech group with plants already running, it is marginal.

"Rather than spending years building manufacturing and commercial infrastructure ourselves, we can now access much of that within the group and move faster," Miller said.

What the next 12 months look like

The near-term agenda is commercial, not scientific. Over the next year Daisy Lab will push further scale-up and optimization, proceed with regulatory filings in what Miller described as a couple of geographical priorities she declined to name, run customer trials, and transfer its process into Mycofeast's manufacturing plant.

The regulatory piece matters. Fermented dairy proteins are threading through approval systems worldwide: US companies have pursued FDA no-questions letters and self-affirmed GRAS status, the EU's novel food process is the gate for Europe, and Asia-Pacific regulators are diverging on how much testing to require. Having a parent company with existing commercial corridors and pooled regulatory documentation is, for a small startup, worth more than another funding round.

The race for the thousand-dollar kilo

Mycofeast is not buying into an empty field. Fermentation-derived lactoferrin has become one of the busiest corners of food tech. Helaina's human lactoferrin is already in around a dozen US products, and Nestle is working with the startup on infant formula. TurtleTree's bovine lactoferrin is on the market through partner brands, and the company is manufacturing with Novonesis. Vivici self-affirmed GRAS status for its bovine lactoferrin in the United States. All G has launched its own bovine lactoferrin stateside.

Meanwhile the infrastructure is scaling up around them. In Abu Dhabi, a consortium led by UK investor New Agrarian is planning a 4-million-litre protein fermentation facility and has signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Ghurair Foods for the dextrose syrup that will feed the microbes. The inputs of industrial fermentation are becoming an industry in themselves.

What the Mycofeast deal signals is a phase change. The first wave of precision fermentation dairy was about proving the biology. The current wave is about proving the factory: who can run thousands of litres, file in multiple jurisdictions and land customers before the money runs out. On that score, a 16-million-litre plant beats a 500-litre fermenter every time. The question now is whether the economics of fermented lactoferrin, which look so compelling at 1,000 dollars a kilo, can survive the climb down to mass-market prices.