British Biotech Startup Slashes Scale-Up Costs for Sustainable Oils
Sun Bear Biofuture, a UK based biotech startup making sustainable fats and oils from fermentation, has completed its first successful production run using a custom-built pilot plant at less than 10% of the average setup cost. For just £25,000 the new automated, end-to-end facility has production capacity for dozens of kilos per month. This will be utilised to supply the growing demand from the food and cosmetic sectors for more resilient and stable supply chains for their lipid ingredients.
Scale-up costs are a blocker and major concern for the UK bioeconomy. A conventional precision fermentation pilot plant costs between £350k-£1m. Sun Bear Biofuture’s approach validates a scalable pathway using readily available, lower-cost brewery and dairy equipment, enabling them to be price competitive with commodity products like cocoa butter.
Sun Bear Biofuture was founded in 2022 with a mission to dramatically reduce the impact that fats and oils have on the planet. Their ingredients cut land use by up to 95% and reduce the carbon emissions of similar tropical ingredients, like palm oil and cocoa butter, by 90%. Tropical oils have seen major supply fluctuations in the last 5 years. The cocoa butter price increased 6 fold in 2025, and there is a huge industry push to find alternatives with more resilient supply chains.
“Proving our low capex expansion plan was a key goal for this year and we’ve smashed it. We are now working with a globally renowned cosmetics company to launch our planet friendly cocoa butter alternative in their range next year, which will be the real pinnacle of our efforts over the past 4 years.
The scope to meet customer demand for stable supply chains by producing our cocoa butter and oil range locally, whilst dramatically reducing the impact the industry has on the planet is hugely exciting.”
Ben Wilding, CEO, Sun Bear Biofuture
In 2024 the Sun Bear Biofuture team achieved a record breaking cell lipid content of 78%, which reflects the amount of the yeast cell made up of fat. This helps significantly drive the cost of production down and is when the team started to focus on scale up. Multiple iterations of designs for the fermentation tank and wider production facility took place over the past 18 months. The fermentation tank has cost less than £1,000, whilst the normal cost would be £250,000 upwards, and the downstream processing of the yeast biomass has been revolutionised for efficiency.
Innovation around the downstream processing method of oil extraction has helped drop production and scaleup costs by removing multiple industry standard pieces of equipment. It also means that use of solvents, such as hexane, is not required. These solvents are very common within the existing fats and oils industry but harmful to human health. A 2025 study by Greenpeace highlighted that in two thirds of a sample of 56 supermarket products selected solvents were present.
In June this year Sun Bear Biofuture will carry out sensory testing with the Centre for Nutrition and Health at Oxford Brookes University, testing consumer responses to their innovative ingredients in food and cosmetic products. Sun Bear Biofuture was recently awarded Innovate UK funding to trial reformulations with a major high-street cosmetics brand, alongside the University of the Arts London. To date these trials have shown no performance difference between cocoa butter and Sun Bear Biofuture’s yeast-derived alternative, making it an ideal drop-in substitute.
Validation of their low-capex approach unlocks Sun Bear Biofuture’s ability to scale further and build their range of fats and oils, such as replacements for palm oil. They are planning their demo plant for 2027, with capacity for hundreds of tonnes annually. Their goal is to scale to industrial levels by 2029, then commence global franchising of their process