GEA Invests €4 Million in Sarstedt Biotechnology Center to Bridge Lab-to-Industrial Scale-Up Gap
Key Insights
GEA (search) has relocated its Application and Technology Center for New Food and Biotechnology from Hildesheim to Sarstedt, Germany, backed by a €4 million investment.
The center enables companies to test precision fermentation and cell cultivation processes at pilot scale using 50- to 500-liter bioreactors before committing to industrial production.
The facility unites pilot infrastructure with engineering expertise under one roof, employing approximately 240 specialists across engineering, sales, automation, and service.
GEA (search) has relocated its Application and Technology Center (ATC) for New Food and Biotechnology from Hildesheim to Sarstedt, Lower Saxony, Germany, investing €4 million to convert and equip an existing building at its established engineering site. The center, operational since 2023, brings three years of pilot project experience to its new location, where it will help companies in the food, ingredients, and biotechnology sectors develop and test pilot-scale production processes for precision fermentation, cell cultivation, and other biomanufacturing applications.
The relocation consolidates GEA (search)'s specialized pilot infrastructure with its primary engineering divisions under a single roof. Approximately 240 employees now work at the Sarstedt site, combining roughly 200 existing staff in engineering, sales, automation, and service with around 40 colleagues from the ATC. "This new technology center strengthens Sarstedt as a place for engineering, technology and skilled jobs," said Heike Brennecke, mayor of Sarstedt. "It sends a clear signal that biotechnology is being developed here and put to work."
Addressing the Scale-Up Bottleneck
Moving from laboratory results to industrial production represents one of the most challenging stages in biotech process development. An organism may produce a target product in the lab, and a cell line may grow successfully, but whether these results translate into an economically viable process only becomes clear when work moves into larger, more integrated process steps.
At the ATC, companies can assess critical questions early: Can the process be run consistently? What product quality does the target application require? To answer these questions, GEA (search) connects bioreactors ranging from 50 to 500 liters with upstream and downstream steps including media preparation, separation, filtration, hygienic process design, and automation. The result is a more solid basis for the next decision, whether that means food-grade piloting, partnering with a contract manufacturer, or planning an industrial plant.
Frederieke Reiners, Vice President New Food & Biotech at GEA (search), emphasized the financial prudence of early-stage testing: "A good lab result creates interest. A solid process creates confidence. And sometimes the most valuable outcome of a test run is a clear no – because a process isn't stable enough yet, or the cost structure simply doesn't hold up. Learning that early can save a company a lot of time and capital."
Beyond Alternative Proteins
While precision fermentation and cell cultivation receive significant public attention in the context of alternative proteins—producing alternatives to fish, meat, and dairy proteins—the center's applications extend considerably further. Biotechnological processes can produce enzymes, amino acids, vitamins, flavors, and other functional ingredients for food, feed, and healthcare. Many of the underlying process steps are similar across these applications, but the right design depends on the organism, the product, and the target application.
Klaus Stojentin, CEO of GEA (search)'s Nutrition Plant Engineering Division, noted: "New Food and biotechnology need places where you can find out whether a promising process can actually become a viable industrial application. In Sarstedt, we bring pilot infrastructure and engineering expertise under one roof. That gives our customers a stronger basis for their next decision."
Building the European Biotechnology Ecosystem
Germany's federal government has recently identified precision fermentation and industrial biotechnology as priority future technologies. The ATC in Sarstedt represents one contribution to translating that policy recognition into concrete industrial structures, including pilot facilities, predictable regulatory processes, and partners across the full value chain.
At the opening event, representatives from industry and biotechnology explored how Europe can build stronger scale-up pathways. Among the partners represented were the Biotechnology Fermentation Factory (search) (BFF) in Ede, Netherlands, which is building open-access food-grade pilot capacity on the NIZO Food Innovation Campus, and Solar Foods (search) in Finland, which produces its fermentation-based protein Solein at industrial demonstration scale.
The New Food sector is moving more slowly than many early forecasts suggested, with financing, regulation, production costs, and scale-up all influencing how quickly new processes reach the market. For GEA (search), the core question remains whether biotech processes can move safely, reliably, and economically from the lab into industrial use—not to replace conventional food production, but to open additional production pathways for specific ingredients where climate risks, animal health pressures, raw material shortages, or fragile supply chains put existing systems under strain.