Daisy Lab, the Auckland start-up that brews dairy proteins from genetically modified yeast instead of cows, has been sold to British industrial biotechnology company Mycofeast for a price neither side will disclose. The founders say the research team stays in its Parnell laboratory, but the proteins will be made at commercial scale in Europe rather than New Zealand.
The deal was announced this week and reported by RNZ on Friday. Mycofeast was only founded in 2023 but has grown quickly by buying other companies. It is headquartered in Oxford, runs a research arm called Evolutia Bio in California and operates a 16 million litre fermentation plant in Poland. Its existing products include carotenoids and other compounds made by fermentation. Daisy Lab gives the group its first foothold in Australasia and a dairy protein platform it did not have before.
Daisy Lab was set up in 2021 by Irina Miller, Nikki Freed and Emily McIsaac. Its method, known as precision fermentation, inserts the gene for a milk protein into yeast and then grows the yeast in a fermenter so that it pumps out the protein. The company began with beta-lactoglobulin, the main protein in whey, but in early 2024 it shifted its focus to lactoferrin, a far rarer and far more valuable molecule.
Lactoferrin is an iron-binding protein found in colostrum and milk, and it is prized by infant formula makers for its role in immunity. Cow’s milk contains only around 0.02 to 0.2 grams per litre, and Green Queen reported in May 2025 that it can take 10,000 litres of milk to purify a single kilogram, which then sells for somewhere between US$750 and US$1,500. New Zealand already produces a good deal of it the conventional way. Fonterra opened a $15 million protein fractionation plant at Hautapu near Cambridge in October 2004 with lactoferrin as its first product, aimed at infant formula and supplement makers in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan.
Daisy Lab’s pitch was that yeast could do the job without the cow. In May 2025 it said its strain was producing multiple grams of bovine lactoferrin per litre of fermentation broth, more than ten times the concentration in milk. “When scaled, the cost to produce our lactoferrin is likely to be about 10 times lower than the commodity price of lactoferrin,” Miller told Green Queen at the time.
Getting from a promising strain to a product is the expensive part, and that is what the sale is really about. The Environmental Protection Authority approved Daisy Lab in mid-2024 to scale up to 5,000 litres of fermentation in a contained facility, and the company installed a 500 litre fermenter in Parnell in the first quarter of this year. It had raised about $1.75 million by last year and was preparing to seek more to build a pilot plant. That money did not come easily.
“We weren’t running a sales process. We have been working with Mycofeast as a potential partner and customer,” Miller told Green Queen. “With the challenges we faced around capital [raising] and with the general market conditions for food tech and biotech companies, the conversations naturally progressed to potential acquisition.”
She was blunt with RNZ about where the big fermenters would sit. “There can be a lot of work done in New Zealand, it’s scaling further is where things start getting more challenging, and we always knew that a large-scale production is not going to be in New Zealand,” she said. “It’s going to be at a customer site or like in this case, that’s going to be at Mycofeast’s site in Europe.”
The Auckland team is not being wound down. “There are no layoffs associated with the acquisition. Mycofeast wanted both the technology and people,” Miller said. The three founders will take on roles across the wider group while continuing to run the New Zealand business, and the lactoferrin programme will be developed jointly with the Evolutia Bio team in California. In a statement reported by Inside FMCG, the company described its own history plainly. “Through all of this, Daisy Lab has remained a very small company. What we have never had in headcount, we have made up for in an extraordinary amount of determination, ingenuity, delusional optimism, grit and stubbornness.”
Mycofeast chief executive Witek Hruzewicz told RNZ the attraction was partly the country itself. “New Zealand has an exceptional combination of dairy science, fermentation expertise and practical engineering capability,” he said. “Daisy Lab has built strong technology and, importantly, demonstrated its ability to move that technology beyond the laboratory.” In the company’s own announcement, also carried by Green Queen, he set out the thinking behind its acquisition spree. “The sector has no shortage of exceptional science. The harder problem is connecting that science with process development, industrial manufacturing, capital and commercial markets quickly enough – and with economics that actually work.”
The sale fits a wider shake-out. Green Queen counts more than 90 alternative protein companies that have merged, been bought, gone bankrupt or shut down since September 2024, as venture funding for food technology dried up. For a small New Zealand firm whose technology needs industrial-scale fermenters to prove itself commercially, selling to a group that already owns those fermenters is a rational exit, even if it means much of the value created here is eventually captured offshore.
Regulation is part of the backdrop too. Daisy Lab’s yeast is a genetically modified organism, so every step up in scale has needed EPA sign-off under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, even though the regulator has said the purified protein that comes out the other end contains no modified organisms. The Government’s Gene Technology Bill, which would have rewritten those rules, stalled after New Zealand First withdrew its support and Newsroom reported last month that the bill is now effectively parked until after the 7 November election.
Miller does not expect fermentation to replace the dairy herd. She told RNZ that lactoferrin and other high-value molecules are where the disruption will land first, while bulk dairy and precision fermentation will run side by side. “The technologies will continue to co-exist, but definitely precision fermentation is becoming a more mature technology now,” she said. Over the next twelve months the Auckland team’s job is “further scale-up and optimisation, regulatory [filings], customer trials and transferring the process into Mycofeast’s manufacturing plant”, she told Green Queen. “Now that we are part of Mycofeast, it will enable us to proceed with regulatory filings.”
Is it a loss when a New Zealand start-up sells to an overseas buyer, or the natural end point for a small country’s science? Would you buy infant formula with lactoferrin made by yeast? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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