On 28 May, Clúster FOOD+i organised a roundtable at Food4Future (Bilbao), bringing together DELICIOUS and EPIC Shift projects, alongside key voices from the alternative protein sector. Moderated by Beatriz Romanos, the session featured Max Boniface (Väcka), Caroline Idowu (ATOVA), Irene González (CNTA), Elena Díaz de Apodaca (Tecnalia) and Paula Aguado (FOOD+i) and explored two questions: what does it take to build a market-ready product, and what is preventing it from scaling once it exists.
In the first block, Max Boniface shared unfiltered lessons from Väcka’s journey from lab to industrial production.
Caroline Idowu focused on regulation, pointing out that most companies address regulatory challenges too late. Her recommendation was clear: regulatory readiness is not a final phase of the process, it is a variable that must be present from the very beginning of product design. The frequent back-and-forth with EFSA is not a matter of bad luck, it is a matter of insufficient anticipation.
Irene González pointed to one of the sector’s most persistent blind spots: a lot of effort goes into developing very specific protein ingredients without clearly understanding the final use case or the real problem they are supposed to solve. Starting from the use context and the value chain needs, not just from the protein itself, would help avoid technologies that are excellent on paper but very hard to implement in real products.
Elena Díaz de Apodaca reinforced this with a sharp observation: many technologically interesting ingredients fail in the market not due to a lack of innovation, but because of an early misalignment between development, industrial processability, cost and regulatory framework. Getting these factors aligned from the start is not a detail, it’s what determines whether a product ever reaches a shelf.
Paula brought concrete data to the table from our work in DELICIOUS. Patent activity in fermented dairy alternatives has multiplied by five in a decade, but the sector is still not addressing the consumer’s number one barrier: flavour. The biggest gap between conventional and plant-based cheese is not texture, it’s umami and flavour persistence. And our chef workshop showed something equally important: plant-based products don’t need to compete with dairy on dairy’s terms. They need to build their own category and their own occasions of use.
In the second block, Max described the reality of retail, margins and the negotiating power of distributors, as a barrier most startups don’t anticipate. Our consumer study added another layer: 45% expect plant-based dairy to replicate conventional dairy, while 22% in Spain explicitly don’t want that imitation. There isn’t one consumer, there are at least two profiles with opposite expectations.
The shared message at the end was straightforward: Europe has the science and the funding. What it needs now is integration, between ingredient and final product, between laboratory and kitchen, between technical development and real market validation.
