Cellular Agriculture Australia (CAA) has called on policymakers to treat food and fuel biomanufacturing as a single shared industrial foundation, arguing that Australia’s siloed approach to precision fermentation and advanced biofuels is limiting investment and scale.
In a new discussion paper, From Food to Fuel: The Shared Industrial Foundation of Biomanufacturing, the industry body argues that precision‑fermented food ingredients and advanced biofuels rely on largely the same platform technologies, including strain engineering, industrial fermentation infrastructure, downstream processing and digital process control. It contends that Australia’s current policy framing, which treats food, fuels, chemicals, materials and pharmaceuticals as separate industries, has contributed to siloed policy, fragmented investment and missed opportunities to build manufacturing scale of national significance.
The paper compares precision fermentation, used to make ingredients such as egg and dairy proteins, fats and oils, with advanced biofuel pathways including lignocellulosic ethanol and fermentation‑derived fuel intermediates upgraded into sustainable aviation fuel. Both applications, it argues, are large‑volume, cost‑constrained products that depend on efficient industrial‑scale fermentation and face similar scale‑up challenges around feedstock sourcing, strain productivity and process economics.
Strain engineering and synthetic biology, industrial fermentation hardware, and automation and digital control systems are identified as the most transferable capabilities across the two sectors, while feedstock choice, regulatory frameworks and downstream processing requirements diverge more significantly. Precision‑fermented ingredients typically rely on refined sugar feedstocks and fed‑batch fermentation to meet food safety and consistency requirements, while advanced biofuels increasingly target lower‑cost, non‑food biomass and continuous fermentation to maximise throughput.
CAA argues Australia already holds a lead in food biomanufacturing capability relative to advanced biofuels, and that coordinated investment in food biomanufacturing could help de‑risk and accelerate the commercialisation of advanced biofuel pathways. The paper recommends the development of a National Biomanufacturing Security Strategy to align policy, investment and capability development across the full breadth of biomanufacturing applications, including shared pilot and demonstration facilities, biofoundries and workforce development.
The paper follows CAA’s merger with Food Frontier earlier in 2026, cited in CAA’s recent response to CSIRO’s exit from food ingredient innovation, precision fermentation and its national food innovation network, a move the sector said left a significant capability gap. It also builds on CAA’s 2024 white paper on Australia’s precision fermentation sector, which found Australia had the potential to become a global leader in the field if government support kept pace with private investment.
