What Happened
Israel's Brevel and Indian conglomerate The Wave Group have agreed to form an equally owned joint venture that will take Brevel's illuminated fermentation process into a new plant in Uttar Pradesh, according to an announcement dated 21 October 2026. Wave is to finance the site, designed for 300,000 litres of combined capacity; the partners put the investment at $10–15 million. They say building work should begin before the end of 2026, with full-scale output targeted within 18 months. The process grows chlorella and similar photosynthetic microbes on sugar inside closed, lit bioreactors; here the sugar will come from Wave's mill sidestreams. Purallis, Brevel's chlorella ingredient for supplements, is planned as the first product. Brevel's existing commercial reactor in Israel holds 5,000 litres.
Why It Matters
Brevel says its process lets fermentation organisms make light-dependent compounds such as chlorophyll and carotenoids. Moving from one 5,000-litre reactor to a planned 300,000-litre facility, fed by a sugar-industry sidestream, would be a substantial test of whether that hybrid approach holds up at industrial scale.
At 300,000 litres, the hard part is not filling tanks with sugar but getting light into every litre.
FET's Takeaway
In our analysis, the key engineering constraint is light delivery: as culture volume and cell density rise, light penetration falls, so a 300,000-litre total capacity may imply multiple illuminated vessels rather than one large tank. The announcement does not give reactor count, light intensity, yields or feedstock composition. Variable sugar-mill sidestreams may need pretreatment and contaminant screening, affecting cost, batch consistency and food-safety controls.
Verification source: vegconomist ↗