Ferm Labs Raises $3.2M to Kill the Flavor Trade-Off

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-14

Ferm Labs, a Swiss-Italian ingredient startup based in Zug, just closed a $3.2 million (€3 million) round to scale its bioprocessing platform across the global clean-label ingredient market. The round was led by CDP Venture Capital through its Green Transition Fund, with participation from Fund F, Redstone, Euregio+, Alpine VC, and food industry giant Loacker. If you're in the food manufacturing world, you know the struggle: you either use cheap synthetic additives or you pay a premium for natural ingredients that are slow and costly to produce. Ferm Labs says it's found a way out of that corner. ### What Ferm Labs Actually Does Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneurs Stephanie Lüpold (CEO) and Mattia Baroni (CTO), Ferm Labs is building a new category of B2B flavor systems. The company uses proprietary bioprocessing to create high-performance, clean-label ingredients that replicate full sensory profiles while improving cost efficiency and naturalness. Here's the key: they guide non-GMO microbes through custom parameters to accelerate fermentation from weeks to just hours. That high-yield system upcycles low-value sidestreams into potent kokumi peptide profiles, delivering stable, clean-label flavor pastes and powders free of E-numbers, added fats, or high sodium content. ### Kokumesan: The Flagship Flavor Builder The startup's first product, Kokumesan, targets the US and European industrial cheese market—a sector worth an estimated $72 billion. It's upcycled from liquid whey and reportedly delivers an authentic aged-cheese profile. > "The era of flavor trade-offs is officially over. Kokumesan proves what our platform can do in cheese flavoring, but it is just our launchpad. We are building a category-defining B2B ingredient engine—powering the next era of natural food by uniting deep-tech bioprocessing with uncompromising taste at global scale," said Lüpold. According to Ferm Labs, Kokumesan provides 75% cost-in-use savings for manufacturers by reducing the inclusion of expensive raw cheese in formulations from 20% to under 1% without any sensory degradation. That's a massive shift for cheese producers looking to cut costs without sacrificing quality. But it's not just about cost. Kokumesan's high processability eliminates fat and sodium build-up, which prevents machine clogging and extends shelf life. That's a big deal for manufacturers running high-volume production lines. > "We essentially broke the math on industrial flavor kinetics. By accelerating fermentation speed and yield, we eliminated the cost penalty of natural ingredients while delivering a richer, cleaner profile at an unbeatable cost-in-use," said Baroni. ### What's Next for Ferm Labs Headquartered in Zug, with its production engine in Bolzano, Ferm Labs plans to use this capital to: - Expand bioprocessing capacity in South Tyrol - Grow its European B2B sales force - Scale R&D headcount for new product categories The company is positioning itself as a category-defining player in the natural food space. And with the global push toward clean-label ingredients showing no signs of slowing down, Ferm Labs might just be onto something big. For US food manufacturers, this is worth watching. If Kokumesan delivers on its promises, it could reshape how industrial cheese products are formulated—and that's just the beginning.