What we know · Question 6
What is mycoprotein, and is it a fungus or a fermentation?
Short answer: both, in that order. A fungus is grown, the growing is a fermentation, and the fungus itself is eaten. The word covers at least three different foods, though, and only one of them is a supermarket brand you have probably already bought.
This entry takes one question about future food and answers it from dated sources. Sentences marked as claims carry their source, the date we checked it and the date the source was checked. Everything else on the page is our own writing, and it is not a claim.
Entry checked · 31 sentences, each with its source · no person approved these sentences · What this does not show
Filed under mycoprotein · traditional-fermentation · alternative-protein
A fungus, grown on purpose
Start with the second half of the question. It is the easier half, and it settles the first.
The organisms behind mycoprotein belong to a kingdom of their own, separate from plants and animals. [1]
In this category the organism is the food. Nothing has to be purified out of the broth for the result to be worth eating, which is the difference from an ingredient made by precision fermentation, where a microbe makes one molecule and the molecule is separated out.
Quorn's mycoprotein starts from a natural soil fungus called Fusarium venenatum, not from livestock. [2]
The growing step is a fermentation, which the maker compares to the processes used for bread, beer and yoghurt. [2]
Quorn describes its mycoprotein as meat-free protein that is high in fibre and low in saturated fat. [2]
That is also why the history matters more than the announcements. The best-known version of this food has been grown in tanks since long before most of the companies now in the news existed.
A trade report describes that mycoprotein as an edible filamentous fungus first found growing in soil in Buckinghamshire in the late 1960s, grown at commercial scale in large steel tanks. [3]
The same report dates the brand's launch to 1985 in the United Kingdom and 2002 in the United States. [3]
So the answer to the title is both, in that order: a fungus, grown by fermentation. Where the category gets confusing is that one word covers more than one food.
One name, three foods
The pages we read describe at least three different things under the same word.
The first is a filamentous fungus grown as a broth in tanks. It is the version a shopper has been able to buy longest, and it is what the sentences above describe.
The second is mycelium grown through a plant material, so part of what you eat is the material it grew on.
MyForest Foods grows oyster mushroom mycelium on a blend of woodchips inside indoor vertical farms. [4]
It harvests the mycelium as long sheets and cuts them into smaller pieces. [4]
The third never reaches a shelf as a food. It is dried and sold to manufacturers, as a powder or a textured protein, and the buyer is a food company rather than a person.
The Protein Brewery describes its Fermotein ingredient as a nutrient-dense mycelium protein with a complete amino acid profile, prebiotic fibre, micronutrients and fungal bioactives. [5]
The same page puts Fermotein at 50% complete protein and 30% prebiotic fibres. [5]
Enifer describes PEKILO as a mycoprotein made from circular-economy side streams. [1]
Enifer says its mycoprotein was in industrial production between 1975 and 1991. [1]
Enifer lists PEKILO at up to 50% protein and 34% fibre, and presents it as a drop-in ingredient for food, pet food and aquafeed makers. [1] [1]
The names printed on those labels are regulator-facing rather than shopper-facing, as the chief executive of one of those makers explains.
The maker's chief executive says the Latin name on a label is a regulatory designation rather than consumer-facing language, and that customers use names such as mycoprotein powder or mycelium protein. [6]
One word, three foods. Our own directory uses the same word as a category, which is why this entry says which one it means each time.
Where it is allowed
The readable regulator records in this run are dated tables rather than announcements, and both of the rows below took years to appear.
Canada's completed novel-food list carries a 2026-07-06 entry for Rhiza Mycoprotein, a non-viable dehydrated mycelium biomass of Neurospora crassa strain BSTR26, from The Better Meat Co. [7]
The same list carries Fy Protein, a nutritional fungi protein from Fusarium sp. strain flavolapis, from The Fynder Group, dated 2023/01/20. [7]
A row on Canada's list is a statement about an assessment, and the page says what it means in its own words.
Canada's page describes its opinions as a finding of no objection to a product's sale as food in Canada, based on a review of what the proponent submitted. [7]
Europe's first authorisation in this category is recent, and the report of it is dated.
AgFunderNews reported on 17 June 2026 that the first novel mycelium ingredient authorised for sale in the European Union under the Novel Food Regulation was expected to reach the market in the third quarter of 2026. [6]
The report says the European Commission allows the ingredient to be labelled as Rhizomucor pusillus mycelium, and that it is approved for sale in Singapore and has self-GRAS status in the United States. [6] [6]
A row on a list is permission to sell a food, not evidence that anybody is selling it. The two are easy to merge when a company's announcement is the only page you read.
What you can buy
This is where the answer narrows, and it narrows fastest in Canada.
The Canadian consumer route found in this run was Maia Farms' own store, where the shop page showed ULTRA from $32, FLOUR from $25, and RUBY STRIPS marked sold out. [8]
The same maker's own listings show why one word is not enough: two of its products name a single ingredient, and the others name a blend.
The maker's FLOUR listing gives the ingredient as 100% organic oyster mushroom powder, and its GROUND listing gives textured protein made from pea protein and oyster mushroom. [9] [9]
Not everything listed is something you can buy. That maker's own feed separates what is available from what is only shown.
The same feed marked the 25 kg FLOUR bag at $488 and the 5 kg RUBY STRIPS bag at $225 as unavailable. [9] [9]
In the United States the route is a maker's own distribution claim plus its own short list of online shops.
MyForest Foods says its products are available at more than 3,000 stores nationwide and online. [4]
Its own locator names five online shops: Fake Meats, Good Eggs, Purple Carrot, Hungryroot and FreshDirect. [10]
In the United Kingdom the incumbent's own page sends shoppers to supermarkets, and warns that the range differs from store to store.
Quorn's United Kingdom site sends shoppers to supermarkets and says its range varies by store. [11]
Two of the makers here sell to food businesses rather than to shoppers: their own pages offer samples and applications, not packs. That is not a gap in the market so much as the shape of it, and it is why an ingredient approval and a shopping trip are different facts.
What went wrong
The failures belong inside the answer to "can I buy this", not in a footnote. This category has the heaviest failure record of anything we have researched so far.
No product in Meati's own store feed was marked available on 18 September 2026. [12] [12] [12] [12]
AgFunderNews reported on 15 September 2026 that two companies had jointly bought equipment from the defunct alternative-protein firm Meati Foods, giving them 300,000 litres of fermentation capacity for $75,000. [13]
The same report says Meati entered an assignment for the benefit of creditors in May 2025 and laid off the bulk of its staff by the end of that year. [13]
AgFunderNews reported in January 2026 that Meati's property in Thornton, Colorado had been seized by the county sheriff over non-payment of almost $7 million in property taxes. [14]
The incumbent tells the same story in quieter numbers.
AgFunderNews reported on 17 August 2026 that Quorn's protein segment, which includes the Quorn and Cauldron brands, generated revenues of $120 million in the first half of 2026, up 2.2% on a constant-currency basis. [3]
The report says foodservice, which accounts for 18% of the protein business, fell 5% in the second quarter of 2026. [3]
None of this says the biology failed. The plants that stopped were built at a scale their buyers never reached, and the brand that has sold this food since 1985 is still on a supermarket shelf.
What this does not show
This is the block we require on every entry that could be read as saying something about an outcome. Elements 1 to 7 apply to every entry; 8 to 12 apply where the entry makes a claim about an outcome, and this one does not, so they are answered explicitly rather than left out.
- 1. Dates
- Every factual sentence carries its source's own date and the date we checked it (18 September 2026). Health Canada's page and the makers' pages are not dated on the page; their contents are tables, press pages and product listings read on that date. The trade reports cited here carry their own publication dates, from July 2024 to September 2026.
- 2. What kind of evidence this is
- Two regulator tables, six maker pages, one maker store feed, and four articles from one trade publication. No trial, no study and no life-cycle assessment is behind any sentence here, and the maker pages are the makers describing their own products.
- 3. Who was studied
- Nobody. These sources describe approvals, ingredients, prices and company results. They do not describe a study population, an age range or a follow-up period, because they are not studies. Nothing here is evidence about what happens to a person who eats mycoprotein.
- 4. The comparator
- There is none. This entry does not compare mycoprotein with meat, with tofu or with anything else, and the two environmental figures that would have invited that comparison were written and then left out.
- 5. Adjustments
- Not applicable: no statistical model is reported in the sources used here.
- 6. Uncertainty as reported
- The price and stock lines are single observations taken on one day from one shop, and the store shows a dollar sign without naming a currency. The maker's distribution figures are the maker's own. The company results are the owner's own numbers as reported by a trade publication. Eleven sources could not be retrieved at all, and we left out every sentence that depended on them.
- 7. What no source here can say about a product
- No source measures any food in our directory, its ingredients as sold, its price in a shop near you, or what it does for a person. A regulator's row about an ingredient, and a maker's description of an ingredient, are both statements about an ingredient rather than about a meal.
- 8. Counter-signals
- This entry makes no claim about diet and health, so it has no counter-signals of that kind. The findings that work against a flattering reading carry their sources anyway: the best-funded brand in the category had nothing purchasable on the day we checked, one maker's textured protein is mostly pea protein rather than fungus, and the incumbent's foodservice sales fell while its retail sales recovered.
- 9. Adequacy caveats
- Not applicable. This entry makes no claim about nutritional adequacy for anyone, at any age. A complete amino-acid profile for one maker's ingredient is that maker's own description of that ingredient, not a statement about a diet.
- 10. What we did not check
- No life-cycle study was read. No person reviewed or approved these sentences before publication. Ten pages from one trade publication answered HTTP 500, so the category's bankruptcy, its shutdown and several of its retail listings are not claimed here at all. The Singapore Food Agency's approved list answered HTTP 200, but its PDF could not be read by any extractor available in this environment, so no Asian approval is claimed. The United States regulator's notice inventory has moved from the address in our own prompt set and returned HTTP 404, so no United States approval is claimed. We did not test a purchase, and we did not search every market in which these companies operate.
- 11. What would change it
- One retrieved page from the publication that blocked us, one readable regulator PDF, one stock line that changes, or someone reviewing these sentences. Any of those would move a sentence in this entry.
- 12. What is not on this page
- Some sentences written for this entry are not here. They are left out when their source could not be retrieved, when the source did not carry the point the sentence made, when the source contradicted it, or when the wording was too hedged to state plainly. Nothing here rests on the ten pages that would not load. Other sentences were left out for length, and the entry's own record names each one and the reason. The full list of what was written and left out is in this entry's record, not on this page.
This page is general information about published sources. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health professional. No clinician has reviewed it, and we do not know anything about your diet, your medication or your health. If a health question brought you here, take it to a professional who knows you.
Our position
Written by Find My Next Bite · 18 September 2026
Mycoprotein is the rare case where the oldest product on the market is also the clearest answer to the question. A brand that has sold a fungal biomass in British supermarkets since 1985 tells you what this food is more honestly than any company founded last year. We would rather build the entry around the boring example than the exciting one.
The names are the real problem. Three different foods travel under one word, one of them is not the fungus at all, and the label names are written for regulators rather than for people standing in a shop. We think the honest response is to say which one we mean each time, and to keep the word that the directory uses from quietly implying more than it does.
The failures are the part we refuse to leave out. A category whose best-funded company sold its tanks for $75,000 is not a category to describe with a growth chart, and a reader deciding whether to try something deserves to know that the shelves are thinner than the announcements. None of that means the food is bad. It means the two questions — what is it, and can I buy it — have different answers, and this page keeps them apart.
Every change this site makes to a sentence it has published is recorded, dated, at Corrections and revisions — what it said before, what it says now, and which kind of change it is. Nothing here is rewritten quietly.
Where to go next
If you came here to understand the food, the directory is where the useful part starts: it carries mycoprotein products with dated sources, and ordinary links on this site earn us no commission. No product, maker or merchant paid for a mention in this entry.
Browse the mycoprotein foods →
See everything in the directory →
Nothing in this entry is for sale, and no promotion or paid placement appears inside it.
Sources
Every numbered sentence above was checked against the source with that number on the date shown. The number links to the entry in this list.
- Enifer. Enifer. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 4 sentences in this entry. - Quorn's mycoprotein page. Quorn Foods. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 3 sentences in this entry. - Quorn: UK retail recovery gathers pace but foodservice likely to get worse. AgFunderNews. trade-press. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 4 sentences in this entry. - Our process. MyForest Foods. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 3 sentences in this entry. - The Protein Brewery. The Protein Brewery. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 2 sentences in this entry. - The Protein Brewery wins EU approval for Fermotein mycoprotein. AgFunderNews. trade-press. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 3 sentences in this entry. - Completed safety assessments of novel foods including genetically modified (GM) foods. Health Canada. regulator. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 3 sentences in this entry. - Maia Farms store. Maia Farms. merchant. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 1 sentence in this entry. - Maia Farms product feed. Maia Farms. merchant. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 2 sentences in this entry. - Find MyBacon. MyForest Foods. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 1 sentence in this entry. - Where to buy Quorn. Quorn Foods. company. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 1 sentence in this entry. - Meati brand store product feed. Meati Foods. merchant. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 1 sentence in this entry. - Ayana Bio acquires Meati Foods' assets. AgFunderNews. trade-press. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 2 sentences in this entry. - Meati Foods' property seized for non-payment of taxes. AgFunderNews. trade-press. Open the source ↗
Checked 18 September 2026. Backs 1 sentence in this entry.