The Food Safety Decisions That Shape Fermentation Scale-Up: Thought Leadership by Apollo Safety
- Marc Violo
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Article in partnership with Apollo Safety a a food safety and quality consultancy working with founders and operators in the food-tech and fermentation industry as they launch and scale.
Fermentation-based FoodTech is no longer confined to the lab bench and is becoming an industry in its own right. By the end of 2024, more than 160 companies were developing biomass, precision, and other fermentation approaches for alternative proteins, attracting significant capital despite a more disciplined investment climate across alternative proteins.
As commercialisation accelerates and production volumes increase, teams are often required to make system and process decisions under compressed timelines. Methods that worked at pilot scale must now remain consistent, controlled, and defensible in larger-scale operations.
We recently sat down with Adam Best, founder of Apollo Safety, to discuss how fermentation teams can navigate this transition.
“When food safety and quality are built into the design and development stages, they enable faster launches, more robust scale-up, and smoother conversations with partners, regulators, and retailers,” says Adam, who has spent more than 20 years in the food industry and now works with FoodTech and fermentation-led companies. “When addressed too late, they create friction in a sector where consumer trust is still being built.”
When food safety decisions really start to matter
Adam believes many recurring scale-up issues are not scientific failures but timing mistakes.
Many teams bring more detailed operational food safety discussions into the process once production parameters are close to being finalised. At that stage, HACCP, one of the core frameworks used to identify and control food safety risks, is often applied to document existing choices rather than shape them.
“Engaging food safety late removes optionality. Engaging early creates it.”
“In practice, the highest leverage point for food safety sits much earlier,” Adam explains. “It’s alongside product development, operations, and facility design. That’s where decisions are made that quietly shape safety, shelf life, yield, and operational stability for years to come.”
Here, “early” means before layouts are fixed, equipment is ordered, and process logic is locked for external stakeholders such as investors or regulators. Once those decisions are set, options narrow quickly.
Designing safety into the process, not bolting it on
In Adam’s experience, teams rightly focus early on strains, substrates, and core process conditions. These decisions define product performance and determine what becomes controllable later at scale.
As programmes move from lab to pilot, attention shifts toward yield, capex, and throughput. At that point, operational food safety considerations can slip into the background.
Decisions about where a heat treatment step sits, how raw and treated areas are separated, how materials and waste flow through the facility, and how equipment is cleaned are sometimes treated as engineering details rather than design choices with long-term consequences.
“When those elements aren’t shaped early, teams end up compensating later,” Adam says. “You see additional testing, procedural controls, and workarounds layered onto systems that were never designed with operational food safety in mind.”
Using HACCP as a decision lens
HACCP is widely recognised in food safety management, but Adam sees significant variation in how it is used during scale-up. “In many projects, HACCP appears once processes are largely defined,” he notes. “At that point it formalises decisions that have already been made rather than influencing how the process is structured.”
Used earlier, HACCP functions differently. It becomes a decision lens that helps teams test assumptions, identify critical steps, and adjust process logic or layout while changes are still relatively low cost.
This becomes particularly important when moving from lab to production. Feedstocks change. Batch sizes increase. Cleaning cycles evolve. Each transition introduces variation that never appeared at bench scale.
“A good HACCP shows you how the system behaves under stress,” Adam explains. “It highlights where controls need validation, where failures could cascade, and where resilience needs strengthening before scale exposes weaknesses.”
Done well, it becomes a shared language across operations, food safety, and quality teams, supporting faster alignment rather than slowing progress.
Four recurring operational patterns
For teams moving from pilot to production, early HACCP thinking and food safety engagement often improve both operational performance and overall project planning. Based on Adam’s experience, four areas consistently stand out.
Facility layout and material flows
Facility design is a major focus in early FoodTech projects, with teams prioritising throughput, flexibility, and future scale. The complexity often lies in how physical layout, zoning, and material flows interact with food safety requirements once infrastructure decisions are set.
Over time, these early choices quietly shape hygiene risk, cleaning time, equipment downtime, labour needs, and product performance once operations begin.
“Once layouts are fixed, your options narrow quickly,” Adam notes.
Bringing food safety input into concept and early design changes that dynamic. Using HACCP-style thinking to shape flows, zoning, and structural hygiene requirements while layouts are still flexible reduces risk and improves operational efficiency, start-up stability, and long-term performance.
Process definition and equipment selection
As processes are defined, decisions about where critical steps such as heat treatment sit, how equipment is configured, and how product transitions between stages are often shaped by throughput and engineering constraints.
“These decisions don’t just affect throughput. They define where your risk sits.” Adam says.
Downstream impacts can include contamination risk, shelf life limitations, additional testing requirements, and the potential for rejections once production is underway.
Engaging food safety input at this stage helps clarify which steps are truly critical, particularly around heat treatment and post-heat handling. Early involvement reduces contamination risk and avoids unnecessary testing or rework later in the process.
Production trials and shelf life
As launch timelines tighten, production trials are often compressed. Parameters may be adjusted between runs, and shelf-life testing moves later in the plan. The risk is that repeatability has not been fully demonstrated before launch. If issues emerge during shelf-life testing, there is limited room to correct them without affecting timelines.
“If you haven’t demonstrated repeatability before launch, you’re relying on a best case,” Adam says. Building in time for a further repeatable trial, along with contingency for an additional shelf-life run, changes this dynamic. If results hold, timelines improve. If they do not, teams still have space to adjust before going live.
Packaging as a bottleneck
As launch plans take shape, packaging decisions often sit slightly behind formulation and process milestones. Artwork approvals, naming discussions, and printed material lead times are expected to align with the broader timeline. In practice, multiple artwork revisions, lead times for printed films, and late discussions around ingredient or product naming can quickly impact the critical path.
Treating packaging as a core workstream helps avoid that. Mapping realistic lead times, aligning them with artwork approval cycles, and building in contingency reduces last-minute pressure. Where possible, working with a CMO or partner that already has established packaging suppliers can further shorten timelines.
Looking ahead
Fermentation scale-up is both a technical and a systems challenge.
The teams that move fastest are not reacting to food safety late, but bringing it in early as a design input. When safety and quality thinking shape decisions from the start, scale-up becomes more stable and external conversations carry greater weight as the industry matures.
About Adam Best
Adam Best is the founder of Apollo Safety, a food safety and quality consultancy working with FoodTech and fermentation-led companies as they launch and scale. Apollo supports founders and operators with pragmatic, stage-appropriate systems across food safety, quality, supplier management, and operational readiness. Adam has spent over two decades in the food industry and has supported teams including Formo and Nosh.bio during critical growth phases.