Why Europe needs the EU Agri-food Biotech Alliance now
Europe’s case for competitiveness and resilience
Biotechnology is a strategic competitiveness issue for Europe. While Europe has a strong scientific base, it remains less effective than other global regions at translating innovation into manufacturing, investment and scale. Agri-BioSolutions, food and feed biotechnology need to be part of the industrial foundation that will shape Europe’s resilience, strategic autonomy and long-term growth.
Europe’s reliance on imported protein feed, limited industrial fermentation capacity, and relatively small share of global biotech investment all point to the same challenge: without the right enabling conditions, Europe will continue to depend on technologies, inputs and production capacity developed elsewhere.
The EU Agri-Food Biotech Alliance addresses fragmentation across the European agrifood innovation ecosystem, helping to connect research, industry and investment so that scientific breakthroughs can be translated more effectively into commercial and societal impact. As a strategic initiative led by EIT Food, the Alliance contributes to key Sustainable Development Goals, including zero hunger, good health and well-being, responsible consumption and production, and climate action, while connecting the full ecosystem.
Why now
No single organisation can overcome these barriers alone; what is needed is a coordinated system response. Research institutions generate evidence, startups bring speed, industry delivers scale, investors mobilise capital and policymakers and regulators shape the enabling framework for innovation and adoption. Without alignment, however, these strengths remain fragmented.
The EU Agri-Food Biotech Alliance is EIT Food’s response to this challenge, designed to connect research, entrepreneurship, industry and policy so that innovation can move from ideas to real-world impact. Its focus is on areas where biotechnology can drive meaningful change, including protein diversification, resilient agriculture, improved health, food security, and production within planetary boundaries.
At its foundation is a shared Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA1), co-created by more than 120 organisations in 2025, which provides a common roadmap for the ecosystem. Rather than remaining a strategic document, EIT Food is translating this agenda into a practical governance model that enables collective action. The objective: identify key barriers, convene the right stakeholders, and support the development of demonstrators, infrastructure, skills and investment pathways needed to scale solutions.
The Alliance’s governance structure - comprising a Strategic Advisory Board, an Executive Steering Committee and six Coordination Councils - is designed to turn shared priorities into coordinated action. The real test now is whether this structure can deliver tangible outcomes: funded projects, pilot facilities, effective policy engagement and measurable impact.
Advancing food security and health
Europe faces growing pressures on food security, including dependence on imported protein crops and exposure to climate and supply-chain shocks. At the same time, public health challenges are changing what food systems are expected to deliver
Through the Alliance, we are calling for greater support for scalable biotechnology solutions that enable protein diversification, improved nutritional profiles and more efficient production systems. Used well, Biotechnology can contribute to food systems that are more resilient, more sustainable and more aligned with health goals.
Building trust, mobilising capital and informing policy
A successful transition depends on demand and legitimacy as much as on supply. Consumer acceptance of novel foods remains mixed, which means the sector cannot rely on technical progress alone to create public confidence. It needs clearer evidence, more transparent communication and more proportionate policy.
The Alliance can help shape a more coherent regulatory environment, convene investors and public funders around realistic scale-up pathways, and support public engagement that builds understanding rather than assuming trust will follow innovation automatically. In short, it can help convert uncertainty into a more investable and more governable landscape.
Creating the right environment
In June 2026, EIT Food hosted the Next Bite Satellite event on Biotechnology in Brussels - a high-level plenary bringing together over 200 leaders from European institutions, industry, startups, investors, research organisations, farmers, regulators and innovation ecosystems. Structured deliberately around the systemic bottlenecks that hold the sector back, the event was designed to surface where the ecosystem's most experienced actors converge - and where they believe collective action is most needed.
The conclusions of Next Bite reflect key recommendations and will inform the Alliance's priorities as its Coordination Councils develop their work programmes. Taken together, they make a compelling case for why sustained, structured coordination is not a nice-to-have - it is a strategic necessity.
Insights from the sector
Despite covering very different topics, all four panels at Next Bite converged on the same underlying diagnosis:
- Europe's challenge is deployment, not discovery. Scientific excellence already exists; what is missing is the financial, regulatory and industrial architecture to bring it to market at scale.
- Fragmentation is the common barrier. Finance, skills, innovation and market development all suffer from the same structural weakness: actors and assets that are individually strong but insufficiently connected.
- Coordination must be treated as strategic infrastructure - not as an administrative overhead, but as a sustained capability that the ecosystem must invest in.
- No single lever is enough. Investment, regulation, talent, market demand and public trust must move together. Pulling on one without the others produces limited results.
These are precisely the conditions the Alliance's six Coordination Councils are designed to address.
Recommended actions for scaling
Financing & Investment - Bridge the second valley of death
The most important insight from this session was the concept of the "second valley of death": the financing gap between demonstration and first commercial production. Speakers from the EIC, EIB, Sofinnova Partners, Enifer and Bioeconomy For Change agreed that Europe has invested heavily in early-stage innovation while leaving a critical gap precisely when industrial investment becomes most capital intensive.
The sector's call: design dedicated instruments - combining grants, equity, venture debt and corporate co-investment - specifically for industrial-scale deployment, not only research and pilots.
Collaborative innovation, skills & talent: Mobilise knowledge
Speakers from Imperial College, VTT, Puratos, the JRC and the University of Turin converged on a shared diagnosis: Europe has optimised its innovation ecosystem for producing knowledge rather than deploying it. The most actionable insight was the call for corporations to move from being passive adopters of innovation to active co-developers - engaging early, sharing risk and, in some cases, becoming the first commercial customers for emerging technologies. On talent, the message was equally clear: the next generation of biotech professionals must combine science with engineering, regulation, entrepreneurship and genuine consumer understanding.
Ecosystem development & market uptake: Make market development part of the innovation process
Speakers from DG GROW, EFSA, Südzucker, Biotech Booster and the Future of Food Institute argued that market uptake is too often treated as the final destination of innovation, when in fact it must run alongside it from the start. Regulatory engagement, consumer trust and corporate procurement decisions all need to be shaped long before products reach commercialisation. The sector's recommendation: treat market development as a process to be co-designed across the value chain, not a finish line that good technology will naturally cross on its own.
Global perspectives
Anna Morser's keynote on China's food innovation ecosystem offered a direct benchmark. China's progress in biotechnology deployment reflects deliberate coordination: aligned industrial policy, long-term investment commitments and ecosystem orchestration at scale. The lesson for Europe is not to replicate China's model, but to match its intentionality.
Europe possesses the science, the talent and the institutional capacity. What it has lacked is a coordination platform capable of aligning them around shared priorities and sustaining that alignment over time. That is the space the Alliance is designed to fill.
From vision to collective action: Europe already has what it needs
The closing high-level dialogue, bringing together representatives from Enterprise Estonia, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, FoodDrinkEurope, Food4All and DG RTD, delivered a clear verdict: Europe does not need another strategy - it needs coordinated implementation. Participants agreed that Europe already possesses the science, talent and institutional capacity for global leadership in agri-food biotechnology; what is missing is a shared mechanism to align them. The call was to simplify, connect and act. The EU Agri-Food Biotech Alliance was identified as uniquely positioned to play that role - provided it moves decisively from discussion to delivery.
Industry and investors: a joint call to action
Europe’s agrifood biotech transition will not be delivered by policy alone. Industry must act as a co-architect of the ecosystem by investing not only in internal R&D, but also in shared infrastructure, demonstration capacity, talent pipelines and routes to market for emerging companies.
Large agri-food companies have a particular role to play. They can validate new technologies, create demand signals, open access to industrial expertise and help promising startups cross the two valleys of death: first between proof of concept and early validation, and then between validation and commercial scale. If established players want a stronger European food system, they cannot remain observers of innovation; they need to become partners in building it.
Investors also need to think differently. Agrifood biotechnology is not a short-cycle opportunity that fits conventional venture timelines. It requires patient capital, staged de-risking and a willingness to back enabling infrastructure as well as products. The opportunity is real, but so is the need for long-term conviction.
If Europe wants an agrifood system that is resilient, nutritious and globally competitive, this is the moment for its major players to invest, collaborate and lead.
Current Situation
By 2040
The Alliance SRIA has been co-developed with more than 120 organisations and is supported by six Coordination Councils covering Financing & Investment, Collaborative Innovation, Ecosystem Engagement, Market Uptake, Skills & Talent, and Joint Undertaking Development.
