Before and after: 5 years of GFI Europe in 6 maps

On 22 August 2019, GFI Europe was founded.

The world today looks very different from how it did back then: AI was still largely the preserve of science fiction, the UK was still (just about) in the European Union, and nobody had yet heard of coronavirus. Time flies, eh?

In the world of alternative proteins, too, the diverse research, industry and policy ecosystem we see today would barely have been recognisable. As international instability and shocks have increased, there have been new obstacles, but nevertheless in those five short years we’ve made a big impact, playing a role in the fantastic growth of plant-based, cultivated and fermentation-made proteins across the continent.

So to celebrate GFI Europe’s fifth ‘birthday’, we’re taking a look at the ‘before and after’ of alternative proteins in Europe, from the perspectives of science, policy, industry and our team.

Our team

Since its founding, our team has grown enormously, and our impact with it.

By the end of 2019, we had just four team members based across two countries. We now have 33 team members across seven countries.

Our team has also grown a lot more multilingual, growing from two languages fluently spoken in 2019, to 10 in 2024:

This growth has been carefully planned, allowing our expanding team (both in terms of size and diversity) to specialise in our work to target the most impactful opportunities we see for accelerating the uptake of alternative proteins. We not only work with scientists, policymakers and industry to build a solid foundation for continued alternative protein progress, but also commission, draft and share important Europe-specific resources to build a compelling evidence base for key stakeholders and help build support for the field. These activities are crucial to gathering broad support for these game-changing foods, and making our global food system more sustainable, secure and just.

Scientific ecosystem

Scientific innovation is key to solving some of the biggest challenges facing our food system today, and the student leaders building our Alt Protein Project (APP) chapters at universities across the world are sowing the seeds for the innovation needed to deliver new products able to compete on taste and price. 

A robust research ecosystem is essential for multiple reasons. Firstly, it attracts new students to work on alternative proteins to feed the talent pipeline for startups and companies in the space. It also enables the growth and diversification of the research that can be done, and attracts further funding for both equipment and research projects. Likewise, as the field grows and general awareness increases, more interdisciplinary work and cross-pollination from other fields becomes possible. Growing such an ecosystem doesn’t happen overnight – it must grow over time, starting from students working all the way up through to university courses and company partnerships.

When the APP was founded in 2020, only one student chapter was based in Europe – Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands. Since then, the student community in Europe has flourished, making the most of Europe’s world-leading research institutions. These student-led organisations are a key part of facilitating organic growth in the research ecosystem for alternative proteins in Europe, laying the groundwork that can then be built on at the institutional level. 

Indeed, this is already starting to happen: alongside the growing grassroots network of the APP, formal university courses on alternative proteins have also begun to emerge across the continent. These are summarised on our resources for students and educators page. However, while a strong start, a lot of ecosystem building remains to be done, and while they are increasing in number, alternative protein courses are still not commonplace across European science departments. 

Alongside this work to build the ecosystem, our grants program has also funded research into solving pressing research questions in the alternative protein space, several of twitch have in turn gone on to unlock significantly greater amounts from national funders.

Policy ecosystem

Government investment in alternative protein innovation is paramount to ensuring these game-changing foods can deliver products able to compete on taste and price at scale within the time frames we need. Research and development is of vital importance, but it is also expensive and risky, as is scaling up. In the face of ever-tightening financial pressures and tight margins on food sector products, private investment, while invaluable, cannot deliver enough support on the time frames needed. What is more, government support enables the open access exchange of research findings, rather than siloed research that may be duplicative. 

As a result, expanding government funding for alternative proteins is one of our key priorities, working with allies on both the EU and country levels to unlock new investment in research, development and scale-up. At GFI Europe’s founding in 2019, only one national government in Europe had made an investment exceeding €1 million. By 2024, that number had grown to 11, with several projects worth tens of millions.

While the landscape for public funding has improved dramatically since 2019, there is still a lot of opportunity that remains untapped, and public funding remains far short of the $4.4-5.7 billion USD global annual investment in alternative protein recommended by a report funded by the UK Foreign Office.

Industry ecosystem

The alternative protein sector has grown rapidly since 2019. Based on entries in our company database, the number of alternative protein startups and companies in Europe has increased by an estimated 45%. 

Consumers are increasingly interested in buying more diversified sources of protein too, from plant-based to cultivated meat. Going forward, however, in the wake of growing global instability and price shocks, public and private investment will both have a key role to play in ensuring the quality and quantity of options available to Europeans continues to grow.

Full steam ahead for the next 5 years!

While this progress has all been the product of the combined efforts of countless researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and nonprofits working tirelessly to build a safer, kinder, and more resilient food system in Europe, we are so proud of the role we have been able to play in contributing to this progress – made possible by our fantastic family of donors who share our commitment to changing the world for the better and maximising the impact we can make with the resources we have. 

The progress to date has been remarkable, but if alternative proteins are to meaningfully move the needle on some of the most pressing issues facing the world today such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and food insecurity, there remains a lot more work to be done, and we can’t wait to embark on the next leg of this exciting journey!

If you want to support our work, you can do so via our donation page, or by getting in touch with europe-philanthropy@gfi.org.

Author

Emily Johnson Head of Development

Emily builds relationships with donors in support of GFI’s global mission to make sustainable proteins the default option.