Clean Food Group (CFG), the UK biotech manufacturer developing sustainable oils and fats through fermentation, has raised £4.5 million in a round led by Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian, alongside participation from Döhler Ventures, the strategic investment arm of global ingredients group Döhler. The equity raise is complemented by a £700,000 non-dilutive grant from Innovate UK, bringing the total new funding to £5.2 million.
The announcement, made at in-cosmetics Global in Paris on 14 April 2026, follows CFG’s transformational 2025 acquisition of a one-million-litre fermentation facility in Knowsley, Liverpool — purchased for around $20 million from the administrators of Algal Omega 3 Ltd. The site is designed to take CFG from pilot-scale production into sustained commercial manufacturing of its yeast-derived oils and fats.
A non-GMO route to palm-oil alternatives
CFG’s proprietary CLEAN OilCell™ platform uses a non-GMO yeast strain, Metschnikowia pulcherrima, originally isolated from wine grapes. The yeast metabolises food-waste feedstocks — principally surplus bread supplied through a partnership with Roberts Bakery — into lipid-rich biomass that can be processed into liquid oils, semi-solid fats and hard fats. The yeast cells are approximately 40 per cent oil by weight, and the platform’s configurability allows CFG to target multiple ingredient categories from a single asset base.
The company’s flagship product, CLEAN Oil™, together with its CLEAN Fat™ range, is positioned at price parity with conventional agricultural oils — notably palm — but without the deforestation footprint, tropical supply chain exposure or regulatory risk associated with incumbent ingredients. In 2025, CFG’s CleanOil™ 25 product received regulatory approval for use as a cosmetics ingredient in the United Kingdom, United States and European Union, opening the first commercial channel for the technology.
Use of proceeds
The proceeds will complete the scale-up of the Knowsley plant, expand production capacity and accelerate commercialisation of CFG’s high-performance oils and fats across both cosmetics and food-and-beverage applications. According to Tom Ellen, Chief Financial Officer, the capital will enable Clean Food Group to “bring on-stream the world’s largest yeast-derived oils and fats facility” and deliver on the company’s long-term vision for sustainable manufacturing.
CFG is working on commercial development with THG Labs and speciality chemicals group Croda, alongside strategic investor Döhler, and has built a demand pipeline with FMCG brands and ingredient manufacturers preparing for the phase-out of tropical oils in their supply chains.
Company background
Clean Food Group was founded in 2022 out of roughly eight years of academic research led by Professor Chris Chuck at the University of Bath. The company has previously received backing from institutional investor SEED Innovations, the EIT Food Accelerator Network, Innovate UK and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
Both lead investors — Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian — specialise in sustainable food and climate technology, providing CFG with strategic capital aligned to its decarbonisation and food-systems thesis. Döhler Ventures brings both financial support and the distribution reach of one of the world’s largest natural ingredients groups.
The market context
Palm and other tropical oils remain embedded in thousands of cosmetics and food formulations, and regulatory pressure on deforestation-linked supply chains — from the EU Deforestation Regulation to a wave of corporate net-zero commitments — has sharpened demand for drop-in alternatives. The sustainable food market was valued at approximately $315 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $524 billion by 2032 at a compound annual growth rate of 6.7 per cent, according to the company.
CFG’s wager is that price parity, non-GMO credentials and food-waste feedstock will prove more commercially durable than either precision-fermentation peers with higher cost structures or agricultural substitutes with land-use constraints. With Knowsley now the bottleneck to commercial reality, the £4.5 million round buys the company time and equipment to translate laboratory results into tonnes shipped.
For investors, the round is a relatively modest growth-equity cheque for a capital-intensive biotech. It is also one of the clearer tests in 2026 of whether yeast-based oils can make the leap from pilot to profitable scale.
Related reading on Sesamers: European fundraising coverage.