Rami Jokela runs a food company that owns no fields, no livestock, and no greenhouses. The ingredient Solar Foods sells, a yellow powder called Solein, is grown in steel bioreactors from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and electricity. In June, the Finnish state backed the company's next factory with €77.8 million. The harder question is what comes after the subsidy.
The final investment decision lands in 2026 and depends on binding customer agreements plus the rest of the financing. The subsidy alone does not guarantee the factory.
Gas fermentation sits at an inflection point: it is scaling up while two peers, Arkeon and NovoNutrients, collapsed, which makes the unit economics the whole story.
Solein is a single-cell protein made by a microbe that feeds on carbon dioxide and hydrogen, in a process the industry calls gas fermentation. It contains 65–70% protein, plus fiber, iron, and B vitamins. It was founded in 2017 as a spinoff from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and LUT University and listed on Nasdaq First North in Finland. The founding claim is that food can be decoupled from agriculture entirely, grown anywhere there is cheap renewable power.
Factory 01 proved the process. The economics remain open
The first plant, Factory 01 near Helsinki, started production in April 2024. By May 2025 the company had verified a hundredfold scale-up from pilot parameters, running an 8-month continuous production stretch before a maintenance stop. The numbers on the operator's board: a 20,000-liter bioreactor, productivity of 0.8 grams per liter per hour, an energy efficiency ratio of 2.7. The pilot had already reached 1.6 grams per liter per hour.
The gap between those two figures is where the business case lives. Every step in productivity and energy efficiency lowers the cost per kilo of a powder that must ultimately compete with whey protein isolate on price, not on mission.
Factory 01 is a one-of-a-kind production facility unlike anything ever built before. We have demonstrated that the results achieved in our pilot facility are replicable and can also be scaled up to an industrial scale.— Petri Tervasmäki, chief technology officer, Solar Foods
The scale jump is now visible: Factory 01 was designed for 160 tonnes a year and is being pushed to 230 tonnes in 2026. That is still a rounding error next to the protein market. It is proof of concept, not a business.
The €77.8 million and the decision that must follow
On 17 June 2026, Business Finland granted Solar Foods €77.8 million toward Factory 02, in Selkäharju, Lappeenranta. The package splits into a €39.6 million grant and a €38.1 million research and development loan, awarded under the European Commission's Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) hydrogen programme. The loan runs ten years at 1% interest, with a five-year grace period and no collateral. The grant covers up to 48% of eligible project costs between 2027 and 2031.
Factory 02 is planned in phases: 3,200 tonnes a year from 2028, 6,400 by 2029, and a stretch target of 12,800 tonnes after 2030. The company has said memoranda of understanding and letters of intent already cover more than half of the output. Estimated selling price: €4.30–5.20 per kilo, in line with whey protein isolate and concentrate.
One condition sits inside the press release. The funding is conditional on the final investment decision (FID) and on securing total financing. The FID is the event investors should actually track, not the grant announcement.
The funding is conditional upon the final investment decision for the Factory 02 production facility and securing the total financing. It is not conditional upon regulatory approvals.— Rami Jokela, chief executive, Solar Foods
That distinction matters. Regulatory approvals are already largely in place: Solein won novel-food approval in Singapore in 2022, self-affirmed Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status in the United States in 2024, and the company is awaiting a European Food Safety Authority decision expected in 2026. Approval is not the gate. Customers and capital are.
The market: first US products, two dead competitors
The commercial side is moving. The first US consumer product containing Solein, a protein powder from the Planta brand, launched in June 2026, and the company has filed for a US patent on the production process. A partnership with the Nordic utility Fortum covers hydrogen production and energy services for Factory 02. Milestones are stacking up.
The rest of the sector is a warning. Arkeon, an Austrian gas-fermentation startup, filed for insolvency in 2025. NovoNutrients, a US peer, called it quits and sought a buyer for its assets. The technology itself never failed. The cost of running it did. As we wrote in July, biomanufacturing infrastructure is turning into an asset class of its own, and asset classes reward whoever hits scale without burning through equity.
Our role is to raise the level of ambition in Finnish R&D by sharing risk with companies pursuing transformative innovations. Projects like this carry risks, but they are exactly the kind of high-ambition, high-expertise investments Finland needs to create entirely new industries.— Lassi Noponen, director general, Business Finland
What decides this bet
Three things. Binding customer agreements that convert memoranda into orders. The remaining financing for a plant the company says needs roughly €182 million for phase two alone. And the cost curve: whether Factory 02's productivity closes the gap to the pilot's 1.6 grams per liter per hour.
The grant is money on the table. It is not a business. Jokela's team has spent eight years proving the process can run. Now the question is whether it can run profitably, against whey, against soy, against every protein that already exists at scale.
That decision comes before the end of the year.
