WARWICK, ENGLAND – Moolec and Grupo Insud have formed a joint venture to develop ingredients and solutions in the alternative protein industry.

Based in Warwick, Moolec uses genetically modified plant-based materials to develop animal-free ingredients. The company uses what it calls “molecular farming,” which is the combination of plant and cell-based production technologies to develop ingredient solutions.

Based in Buenos Aires, Grupo Insud is a manufacturer of biosimilars and other ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry. The company has a background in using cellular cultures to obtain recombinant proteins. Grupo Insud has operations in 40 countries and employs approximately 8,000.

“This partnership allows us to speed up our scientific developments by leveraging the experience, know-how and scaling-up production expertise from one of the top-class players in the landscape,” said Henk Hoogenkamp, co-founder of Moolec. “We are convinced that the new generation of companies has a lot to learn from the scientific talent established in the traditional industry.

“We have the wonderful opportunity to team up, co-create, and disrupt together. Our partnership will also allow for very quick scaling due to the impressive infrastructure readily available to the group. The more we are, the faster we can achieve animal-based parity in terms of taste, nutrition, and cost.”

This past April, Moolec introduced two ingredients targeting the alternative dairy and egg replacement categories.

The joint venture joins a growing list of companies seeking to develop alternative proteins to replace animal-based proteins. Other companies include Motif Foodworks, Inc., Boston; Perfect Day Inc., Berkeley, Calif.; Air Protein, Pleasanton, Calif.; and others.

A report published this past March by the Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon Corp., predicted that the market for alternative proteins may reach $290 billion in sales by 2035.

“Alternative proteins could soon match animal protein in taste, texture, and price,” said Benjamin Morach, managing director and a partner with the Boston Consulting Group. “We expect parity to spur a new wave of growth, catapulting what is a fairly nascent market today into the mainstream, yielding significant environmental benefits, and facilitating even faster growth.”