Explore the Agenda
7:30 am Check-In & Light Breakfast
8:20 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Functionality First: Delivering Performance, Nutrition & Taste at Commercially Viable Costs
8:30 am Egg Proteins as Functional Ingredients: Product Applications From Formulation to Finished Products
- Matching egg protein formats to end-use applications, from bakery and sauces to ready-to-eat and alternative protein products
- Highlighting the key functional properties of egg proteins (e.g. emulsification, foaming, gelling, and binding) and demonstrating how they translate into real product performance
- Exploring how formulation choices influence finished product outcomes, including texture, stability, taste, and shelf life across different applications
9:00 am Bridging Customer Needs & Supplier Capabilities by Aligning Product Applications for Precision-Fermented Proteins
- Understanding technical functionality of novel ingredients to reduce the valley of death for commercialization
- Facilitating collaboration between commercial, R&D, and application teams to ensure small-scale results translate to commercial consumer-desired products
- Evaluating protein functionality for target applications, such as structure, foaming, gelling, emulsification, and texture for sports nutrition
9:30 am Roundtable Discussion: Engineering Functional Proteins to Unlock Food as Medicine
- How can biodesign and precision fermentation be leveraged to engineer functional proteins with targeted health benefits?
- What specific health benefits can these engineered proteins deliver across areas such as metabolic health, gut health, immunity, inflammation, or aging? Where are we seeing the strongest evidence of impact so far?
- What clinical support are we aiming to deliver?
10:15 am Morning Networking Break
Turning Innovation Into Market Adoption & Consumer Demand for Future Proteins
11:00 am Using Cost, Functionality & Supply Stability to Compete with Commodity Proteins
- Solving commodity protein volatility, including price swings, supply disruptions, and functional inconsistency in inputs such as eggs
- Exploring how companies articulate and quantify product value to justify pricing in a cost sensitive market
- Highlighting the structural inflationary pressures facing animal proteins versus the more stable cost drivers of fermentation-based production
- Demonstrating how predictable feedstock inputs and scalable fermentation capacity can enable long-term cost competitiveness
11:45 am Standing Out in Crowded Ingredient Markets: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Undifferentiated Ingredients & Demonstrating Product-Market Fit
- From ingredient to market: Clarifying what your ingredient truly does, why it’s different, and where that differentiation matters
- Finding real demand, not just whitespace: Using category, customer, and market insights to identify credible market opportunities and avoid forcing fit into uninterested markets
- Turning insight into traction: Building sharp value propositions and selling narratives that demonstrate product-market fit and accelerate customer adoption
12:15 pm Positioning Ingredients as an Evolution of Food: Defining a New Category in Nutrition
- Move beyond “alternative” comparisons to position ingredients as category-defining innovations
- Target high-value markets, like sports nutrition and lifestyle beverages, where consumers pay for both functionality and health benefits
- Communicate multi-functional value to end consumers: nutritional benefits, satiety, and enhanced performance, creating premium market differentiation
12:45 pm Networking Lunch Break
Clarifying Regulatory Uncertainties to Accelerate Approvals & Global Market Access
1:45 pm Path to Market in an Era of Regulatory Reform
- Exploring common issues that delay regulatory evaluations and approvals
- Understanding evaluators’ priorities to improve pre-approval scale planning decisions
- Addressing uncertainty during a period of regulatory reform and uncertainty
2:15 pm Roundtable Discussion: Developing Analytics to Meet Regulatory Submission Requirements From Lab to Commercial Scale
- Understanding what aspects of the ingredient and final formulation determine the safety for regulatory submission
- Ensuring the validity of analytical frameworks from lab to commercial scale
- Determining the number of replicates needed to reduce turnaround times
3:00 pm Afternoon Networking Break
Strategic Partnerships That Scale: Mutual Due Diligence Across Capital, Capabilities & the Value Chain
3:30 pm Unlocking Growth Through Strategic CPG Partnerships
- Exploring how CPGs define success and failure in partnerships, and understanding the slow adoption timelines (18+ months from interest to market)
- Uncovering what scaling a partnership looks like, and how startups can align product readiness, pricing, and quality with CPG expectations
4:00 pm Panel Discussion: Proving the Product: What it Takes to Unlock Confidence in Fermentation Startups?
- Showing that fermentation-derived ingredients meet specifications, sensory profiles, and functional outcomes
- Showcasing early use cases or pilot programs that provide tangible evidence of market readiness
- Communicating clear milestones and achievable growth targets that make investment compelling