US animal-free egg protein maker The Every Company has expanded its partnership with pharma manufacturer Huvepharma to scale up production fourfold amid skyrocketing demand.
With its recombinant egg white protein already featuring in products stocked at Walmart, Target and Amazon, interest in The Every Company’s precision-fermented ingredient is soaring.
The Californian startup says that in the first four months of this year, it secured annual orders worth 55% of its total 2025 order volume, ascribing it to strong adoption across B2B retail channels and growing demand across e-commerce and foodservice.
That prompted the startup to look for ways to scale up, and fast. It has now announced a significant expansion of its partnership with pharmaceutical manufacturer Huvepharma, which will quadruple the production capacity for its flagship product, OvoPro.
The move will enable The Every Co to leverage Huvepharma subsidiary Biovet’s nine-million-litre fermentation facility in Bulgaria, one of Europe’s largest and most flexible sites of its kind.
“We’ve been manufacturing with Huvepharma for the last three years. We’ve been producing with them in Bulgaria, and the expansion has taken place in the same facility. Both companies have been investing in that facility to ramp up capacity for the last year,” The Every Co co-founder and CEO Arturo Elizondo tells Green Queen.
“OvoPro was one of several products Huvepharma was producing in one of their Bulgaria sites. Now, the facility is transitioning to being fully dedicated to Every across multiple fermenters with room for much more additional capacity,” he reveals.
The Every Company moves up expansion timeline in response to demand
Precision fermentation involves inserting a DNA sequence into microbes to teach them to produce specific molecules when fermented.
The Every Co engineers Komagataella phaffii (a yeast strain) to produce multiple proteins. OvoPro is a recombinant ovalbumin protein that can replace egg whites’ functionality in a range of applications, while OvoBoost is a highly soluble, taste- and texture-neutral protein equivalent to glycoprotein.
In addition, the firm has developed an animal-free pepsin that acts as a digestive protein. Each of these ingredients has been approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration.
It has been focusing on OvoPro to tackle the egg shortage and rising prices in the US (in some states, a single egg set Americans back $1 over the last couple of years). It functions as both a functional binding agent and a protein-boosting ingredient across baked goods, bars, snacks, confectionery, and pasta.
Last year, The Every Co was already producing several tonnes of its product at a 63,000-litre industrial scale with Huvepharma. It had already doubled its capacity at the start of 2026, with plans to further double it next year.
But the explosive demand for its animal-free egg white protein seems to have accelerated that timeline. “The expansion is geared towards fulfilling OvoPro demand exclusively,” says Elizondo.
“The volume is going towards fulfilling orders for Walmart and Target retail placement through our customers, as well as building inventory for larger launches planned for later in the year.
“The bulk of the orders are coming from existing customers supporting larger volumes of their existing SKUs already featuring OvoPro, as well as adding additional SKUs to their product lines.”
Why The Every Co chose a co-manufacturing model for its animal-free egg protein
The Every Co says it is now running steady-state production and delivering tonnes of product to customers regularly. The new phase of expansion will further optimise batch costs and prepare the partnership for future growth as the startup onboards additional proteins from its fermentation platform.
“Manufacturing has been a major bottleneck in our industry, largely because wholly owned facilities are often +$200M and have multi-year lead times. With the right partners, we knew [we] could scale much faster and much more capital efficiently – paramount for our sector,” explains Elizondo.
“We chose Huvepharma because they are one of the largest industrial fermentation players in the world, with over nine million litres of installed fermentation capacity, making them uniquely suited as our European fermentation partner,” he adds.
Anguel Jeliazkov, chief executive director of Biovet, notes how its fermentation infrastructure serves customers across over 100 countries. “Bringing that capacity to EVERY’s protein platform is a natural extension of what we do. We do not just scale processes – we industrialise them. That is the value we bring to this partnership, and the results so far demonstrate it clearly.”
The Every Co’s OvoPro presents several operational advantages to food producers seeking alternatives to a highly volatile egg supply chain. The ingredient is shelf-stable for up to 24 months, does not require cold-chain transportation or storage, and offers favourable inclusion economics due to its high purity.
“OvoPro is priced to be competitive with, or cheaper than, conventional battery-caged commodity eggs on a cost-in-use basis,” Elizondo told Green Queen earlier this year. “Several multinational customers have already validated that switching to OvoPro is saving them money compared to conventional eggs.”
The Every Co has raised $288M to date, including a $55M Series D round in November. It has additionally partnered with Dutch animal-free dairy startup Vivici and the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to explore setting up an industrial-scale precision fermentation facility with a four-million-litre capacity.
It is one of only two companies to have received regulatory approval for precision-fermented egg proteins in the US. The other, Finland’s Onego Bio, has been locked in a bitter legal battle with The Every Co, with the latter asking a Delaware court to sanction the former for “improper duplicative litigation”, after an identical case was thrown out in Wisconsin. (The Delaware dispute is ongoing.)
