Entrepreneurs on Scaling Food Biotech: Infrastructure and Shared Facilities 

Scaling remains a key bottleneck for many food biotech companies. While technologies mature in the lab, moving to commercial scale is often constrained by access to infrastructure, high capital requirements, and limited availability of suitable facilities. This interactive session focuses on how entrepreneurs navigate that phase, and the role that national initiatives could play to facilitate growth. 

Scaling involves a set of structural trade-offs. Building in-house production capacity provides control, but requires significant investment and carries risk. Relying on shared facilities can reduce upfront costs, but may introduce limitations in knowledge building, access, flexibility, or scalability. Public support mechanisms can play a role, but do not always align with the needs of companies in practice. These choices directly affect the speed and feasibility of scaling. 

The session will bring together entrepreneurs to exchange perspectives on these challenges and make underlying constraints more explicit. The discussion is intended to provide a clearer view on where current infrastructure and support mechanisms fall short. Insights from the session will be incorporated into a broader analysis on scaling barriers in the ecosystem. The outcomes will be synthesized and shared with relevant stakeholders to support more effective interventions.

Supported by Invest-NL