Europe is preparing three closely connected biotechnology IPCEI candidates: bio-based chemicals, bio-based materials, and food and feed ingredients. This guide maps what each one covers, what all three demand, and how to tell whether your project belongs in one of them.
The biotechnology IPCEI initiative is built as three distinct but closely connected candidate IPCEIs, each covering one slice of the bio-based economy. Their common purpose is the same one that runs through every IPCEI: moving highly innovative technology from research towards first industrial deployment (FID), the scale-up step that ordinary funding instruments rarely cover. The three candidates look for projects that scale innovative biotechnological processes, develop fundamentally new processes or products that have not yet reached industrial scale, and have the potential to become part of strategic European value chains.
The boundary is drawn just as clearly on the other side. The candidates are not intended for routine modernisation, replacement investments, standard capacity expansions, incremental product improvements, mass production, or the commercial roll-out of mature technologies. A project that is excellent business but ordinary technology has no path through this instrument; the innovation bar is a real eligibility test, not a drafting exercise.
One structural point worth knowing early: depending on the results of the national selection procedures, the participating Member States may decide to merge two or all three candidates into a combined IPCEI. The final architecture will be settled later in the design process, once the project portfolios emerging from national selections are visible. Applicants should pick the candidate that fits their project best today and design for value-chain integration, which pays off under any final structure.
Candidate 1: bio-based chemicals
The first candidate covers innovative processes for producing chemicals and chemical intermediates from renewable or circular carbon sources: platform chemicals, intermediates, monomers and building blocks for polymers, specialty and fine chemicals, dyes, pigments and auxiliaries for downstream sectors. Two exclusions define the edge of the scope: final drugs, and mass production. The technology palette is broad and technology-neutral: fermentation and gas fermentation, enzymatic and biocatalytic conversion, advanced biomass processing, CO2-based routes, downstream purification and process intensification all qualify, provided they enable production at industrial scale beyond the current state of the art.
Applicants in this stream are expected to place their project explicitly in the value chain: the feedstock and input streams used (upstream), the core biotechnological conversion (midstream), downstream processing and product formulation, and integration into industrial end applications. A project that can only describe its reactor, without its inputs and its buyers, is not yet an IPCEI project.
Candidate 2: bio-based materials
The second candidate covers innovative materials and material-related processes based on renewable biological resources, recycled raw materials, waste streams or biogenic carbon: advanced materials for packaging, textiles, construction, automotive applications and cosmetics; bioplastics and composites; fibre-based and lignin-derived materials; hard carbon materials; and novel forest-based products. The mission is substitution: replacing or complementing fossil-based or imported materials with sustainable, circular, high-performance alternatives.
The assessment questions for this stream follow from the physics and the market at once: material performance, scalability, sustainability and circularity, and uptake by industrial users downstream. Where relevant, projects are expected to address recycling, end-of-life solutions and lifecycle performance, because a bio-based material that cannot demonstrate its footprint advantage at scale has not yet answered the question the IPCEI exists to fund.
Candidate 3: bio-based food and feed ingredients
The third candidate covers innovative downstream production processes for ingredients and functional components of food and feed value chains: alternative proteins, fermentation-derived and cell-cultivated ingredients, microbial and algal lipids and oils, amino acids, vitamins, enzymes and biocatalysts, bioactive compounds, probiotics, postbiotics and prebiotics, and technological and sensory additives. The unit of scope is the ingredient, not the meal: finished branded consumer foods, primary agriculture and farming, and standalone feedstock production are all outside.
The strategic frame for this stream is resilience: reducing reliance on imported protein sources and other critical inputs, valorising side streams, and building food-grade and feed-grade biomanufacturing capacity in Europe.
The bar all three share
– Major innovative nature. Each project must involve a biomanufacturing process, product or value-chain solution beyond the current state of the art in its sector, where biomanufacturing means industrial, technology-neutral production converting renewable resources into bio-based products at scale.
– FID orientation. The project should bridge research and industrial deployment, with high R&D content; further R&D, piloting or demonstration can be included where necessary for first industrial deployment, but early-stage research alone does not qualify.
– A demonstrated need for support. Applicants must show why the project would not happen, or not at this scale or speed, without aid: high technological risk, heavy CAPEX or OPEX, long payback, uncertain demand, missing industrial references, fragmented value chains, or insufficient private financing.
– Cross-border collaboration. Effective collaborations with direct participants in other Member States are a core feature, from joint development to shared testing and downstream validation, and are worth designing before the national call closes.
– Spillover commitments. Benefits beyond the company, project, market, sector and Member State: knowledge sharing, FRAND licensing of IP-protected results, dissemination of non-protected know-how, training and skills, and open, non-discriminatory access to aided facilities, notably for SMEs.
Projects are also expected to line up behind the EU's strategic objectives: scaling biomanufacturing capacity in Europe and reducing dependence on non-EU production, accelerating market deployment of bio-based alternatives to fossil-based products, securing sustainable feedstocks, driving industrial decarbonisation, and strengthening the European biotech ecosystem, including SMEs, bio-foundries and talent, in line with the direction of the EU Biotech Act. Where relevant, the principle of cascading use applies: biomass goes to higher-value material applications before energy recovery.
What to prepare for the national call
The expression of interest is not a technology description; it is a positioning exercise. The questions applicants should be able to answer: which candidate the project fits and why; what it will develop, scale or deploy, from which feedstocks to which outputs; what makes it innovative against the global state of the art; which scale-up step is proposed from which maturity level; which part of the value chain it occupies, including end-of-life where relevant; which cross-border collaborations are plausible; what spillovers it could generate; and what evidence shows the project cannot be realised, or only later, smaller or riskier, without IPCEI support. Companies that arrive at the national call with these answers drafted are, in effect, already writing their project portfolio.
The takeaway.
Read the three scopes as an eligibility filter, not as marketing categories. If your project is a genuine scale-up of a beyond-state-of-the-art biomanufacturing process and you can name your stream, your value-chain position and your cross-border partners, the biotechnology IPCEIs are built for exactly you. If it is a capacity expansion with a green feedstock, they are not, and a faster instrument will serve you better.
Sources
– Rationale of the Biotechnology IPCEI candidates, revised 16 June 2026 (document circulated to applicants in the national calls)
– IPCEI Communication, OJ C 528, 30.12.2021 (EUR-Lex)