Exclusive: Food System Innovations Unveils $2M Lab to Speed Up Sustainable Protein Development

US non-profit Food System Innovations has launched a Sustainable Protein Action Lab to bridge the research funding gap and help future food companies accelerate product development.

To make the protein transition a success, companies must keep improving the sensory credentials of new products, while simultaneously making them more affordable.

That is a tall order, especially in an investment landscape as unforgiving as the current environment. The R&D teams of alternative protein firms face this research funding gap too often, creating a constant bottleneck that prevents the industry from scaling and introducing more appealing food innovations to consumers.

What if they could rely on external research expertise that can analyse ingredients and unleash performance insights more efficiently to make product development faster and cheaper? Better yet, what if it were all open-source?

That’s the premise of the new Sustainable Protein Action Lab opened by Food System Innovations (FSI), a philanthropic impact platform focused on the protein transition.

The lab will identify and solve the “highest-leverage scientific bottlenecks” facing this industry via in-house research, strategic partnerships, ecosystem coordination, and open-source innovation.

“The Sustainable Protein Action Lab is designed to operate at the intersection of science and industry, focusing on challenges that are too applied for academia but too risky, pre-competitive, or resource-intensive for individual companies to tackle alone,” lab lead Liz Specht, FSI’s newly hired VP of science and strategic initiatives, tells Green Queen.

“We’ll work closely with ingredient suppliers, food brands, and research partners to identify shared bottlenecks and develop open-access solutions that benefit the entire sector,” she explains.

A tool to address one of future food’s ‘biggest bottlenecks’

Specht is one of the alternative protein industry’s top scientists, with experience in biotech and biomanufacturing, applied R&D, ecosystem development, and innovation strategy. She has previously served as a Fellow at the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and as senior VP of science and technology at the Good Food Institute.

At FSI, Specht is “formalising and systematising” the non-profit’s ability to set up new initiatives and systems interventions in the scientific R&D realm and broader enabling environment alike, in a “rapid-iteration, experimental way that is both responsive to and anticipatory of the fast-changing world we live in”.

Underpinning that philosophy is the Action Lab’s first initiative, the Data Garden, a $2M open-access ingredient intelligence platform to fast-track sustainable protein innovation

“The Data Garden generates standardised, application-relevant data on ingredient performance and translates that into actionable insights for both suppliers and product developers,” Specht explains.

“This allows companies to make more informed decisions earlier in the product development process, reducing reliance on trial and error, shortening R&D timelines, and ultimately improving product quality and scalability.”

Led by Daniel Westcott, who served as the head of protein and texture at vegan cheesemaker Bettani Farms, the platform is described as a bridge between ingredient suppliers and food manufacturers, translating complex performance data into actionable insights for product development.

Suppliers get to understand how their ingredients perform in real-world applications, and brands can more confidently choose ingredients based on validated functionality rather than trial and error.

“The Data Garden was built to remove one of the biggest bottlenecks in sustainable protein innovation: the lack of comparable, trusted data,” says Westcott. “By making this research open and actionable, we’re helping both ingredient suppliers and CPG brands move faster, reduce development costs, and ultimately bring better products to market.”

Data Garden eliminates high rediscovery costs for plant-based ingredients

So, how does the Action Lab’s first initiative work? “The Data Garden applies a suite of foundational and functional assays to understand plant proteins that are isolated using different extraction techniques,” outlines Westcott.

“We aim to map the material properties of these proteins with diverse processing histories to reveal the ideal combination of ingredients and processes for a given product. Our team of talented scientists operates out of a lab in Berkeley, California, where we test these ingredients to create a public, reusable evidence base for the sustainable protein industry,” he adds.

“Today, any company using plant-based proteins must ask and answer the same questions about the same ingredients: ‘Which protein source meets our functional and commercial goals, and how do we build conviction?’

“If project priorities shift or a company fails to find its commercial footing, insights that these teams derive are often shelved or lost entirely. This forces the next contender to start from scratch every time. That changes with the Data Garden.”

The platform’s open-source data generation eliminates the high cost of discovery, which Westcott calls “a drag on innovation” in the plant-based space.

“The Data Garden is generating open and standardised data on ingredient functionality. Suppliers and purchasers of these ingredients generate data behind IP walls, often using different methods that make cross-comparison difficult,” she says.

“[We] will create a shared resource that allows both suppliers and manufacturers to benchmark performance across ingredient sources for a range of characteristics critical to making delicious foods. This not only reduces duplicated effort but also enables faster, more confident decision-making across the industry.”

The three practical applications of the Data Garden

The Data Garden screens commodity-level protein crops using a suite of analytical tools linking protein functionality to product applications, creating a standardised dataset with three distinct use cases.

First, end-product manufacturers and product developers gain reliable insights into ingredient performance, scored along the dimensions needed to inform formulation and purchasing decisions.

Second, suppliers receive a full analysis of their ingredients, visibility of their products within buyer procurement teams, and insights into which fractionation and processing methods deliver the desired performance for value-added ingredients.

Finally, academic researchers and for-profit developers of artificial intelligence (AI) formulation and product development tools have access to a “standardised, appropriately structured dataset” for machine learning (ML) training and AI interpretation.

“The Data Garden provides detailed insights into how plant proteins perform across key functional attributes, such as solubility, particle size, protein profiling, compositional analysis, foaming, gelation, emulsification, thermal transitions, and texture, within specific product contexts,” says Westcott.

These insights are generated via consistent extraction pathways and testing conditions, enabling meaningful comparisons between ingredients. By reducing uncertainty around protein functionality, the goal is to free up R&D teams’ resources to focus on everything else.

“Cost, supply, allergen status, and regulatory considerations are reliably predictable, but historically protein performance, is not. Everything from stretch to emulsion to composition requires expensive R&D expertise and validation. The Data Garden unlocks a better understanding of function,” Westcott notes.

“Our data is designed to be both application-relevant and directly comparable. That means users can move beyond general specifications and understand how a given ingredient is likely to perform in a real formulation, significantly improving formulation accuracy, efficiency, and ingredient substitutions.

“Importantly, this is also crucial for building a dataset that is designed from the outset for AI and ML ingestion and training, which will play an increasingly important role in accelerating the development of sustainable protein products that deliver on taste, cost, and nutrition.”

Sustainable Protein Action Lab working on more programmes

The Action Lab is launching this platform with data on 10 plant-based ingredients (including pea, soy, hemp and fava); it’s designed to expand over time into a growing public resource for ingredient evaluation.

The Data Garden has assembled an advisory panel comprised of industry and academic experts, including university food science professors Julian McClements and Braulio Macias Rodriguez, Bettani Farms CEO Sandeep Patel, and Tofurkey’s head of R&D, Gilad Kaufman.

“Our advisory board plays a critical role in ensuring scientific rigour and industry relevance. We’re proud of the bench of industry experts we’ve brought together from across academia and industry who help guide our research priorities, validate methodologies, and ensure that the insights we generate are both credible and actionable for real-world application,” says Westcott.

The $2M in funding for the Data Garden comes from FSI, which operates as both a “philanthropic funder and an active builder of initiatives” such as the Action Lab.

“This support enables us to develop the Data Garden as an open-access resource that serves the broader ecosystem rather than any single company,” he notes.

While the Data Garden is just its first initiative, it reflects the broader lens the lab is building: identifying impactful scientific gaps and developing targeted, open-access solutions to address them.

“We’re actively exploring additional programmes that tackle challenges related to ingredient functionality, biomanufacturing, and scalability across sustainable protein categories,” reveals Specht.

Specific initiatives are still in development, and FSI expects to announce them as it builds out its portfolio. “Our goal is to create a pipeline of efforts that systematically remove key bottlenecks and accelerate progress across the entire sustainable protein ecosystem,” she says.

Separately, the non-profit launched an AI-led Food Intelligence Lab last week to create open-source infrastructure to accelerate alternative protein development, backed by a $2M grant from the Bezos Earth Fund.