The recent report ‘UK Fermentation & Downstream Processing Capacity’ (April 2026) from the BBIA, the Biorenewables Development Centre, and the Pioneer Group delivers a sobering diagnosis - the UK has 29.5 million litres of fermentation capacity, but over 99% of it sits in just six large commercial sites. The overwhelming majority of the sector, 77% SMEs and academia, operates at bench or lab scale, with almost nowhere to go next.
The report calls this the "missing middle" describing a fermentation scale-up desert stretching from around 10 litres to 10,000 litres, and beyond it a second valley of death between demonstration and full commercial production. Downstream processing (DSP) is, if anything, worse with access to scalable separation, filtration, chromatography and drying technologies extremely limited and fragmented. Frequently the real bottleneck is reported as long after fermentation formulations have been solved. The report's five priority calls for action are clear: expand demonstration-scale infrastructure, enable large-scale commercial access, strengthen DSP capability, improve coordination and transparency, and develop funding mechanisms that bridge the gap.
The combination of AberInnovation and the Institute of Biological Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS), based at Gogerddan Campus near Aberystwyth, in Ceredigion, offers precisely the kind of integrated, open-access infrastructure the report calls for - and it already exists.
Filling the pilot-to-demonstration gap
Where the report identifies a critical shortage of accessible 1,000–10,000L capacity, AberInnovation's Scale-up Biorefining Centre operates 30L, 70L and 340L pilot-scale bioreactors covering TRL 3–6, and staffed with academic and applied science experts from IBERS and the AberInnovation technical team. This is precisely the lab bench-to-pilot scale transition zone where the report says most companies currently stall or are forced overseas. Crucially, this isn't isolated fermentation capacity - it sits alongside primary processing (100–1,000 kg/hr juicing and pressing), giving companies a genuine feedstock-to-fermentation pathway rather than a single disconnected asset.
The report singles out DSP - centrifugation, membrane filtration, chromatography, spray drying, distillation, as a more acute constraint than fermentation itself, and one requiring integration rather than piecemeal access. AberInnovation's Downstream Processing Suite already covers high-pressure homogenisation, membrane filtration (MF/UF/NF/RO up to 100 L/h), evaporation, pilot-scale spray drying, and fluid-bed granulation/coating - co-located with fermentation. This is the "integrated end-to-end infrastructure" the report says is largely missing nationally.
An open-access model, not a restricted one
The report finds that most UK capacity is restricted to internal or collaborative use, with genuinely open-access facilities confined to a handful of regions. AberInnovation operates on an explicit open-access basis, welcoming companies with "an idea, a strain and data, or simply a problem statement" and co-designing a pilot pathway, directly addressing the transparency and access barriers the report highlights as blocking SMEs in particular. As one of the UKRI’s BBSRC campus family, the AberInnovation mission specifically calls for supporting fast growing businesses on an open access basis.
Expertise, not just kit
The report stresses that scale-up skills are often locked inside specific facilities, restricting knowledge transfer as much as physical access. AberInnovation's technical staff work alongside IBERS academic expertise, plus the co-located Future Food Centre and Advanced Analysis Centre and the wider experts at Aberystwyth University for compositional and analytical support, giving companies process, food-grade, and analytical expertise under one roof, alongside wraparound business incubation, office space and funding support to carry innovations toward commercialisation.
A regional and ecosystem opportunity
The report notes that open-access assets cluster in only a few UK regions, and that Wales's presence in the current data is thin. Ceredigion's growing agri-food and bioeconomy cluster around Aberystwyth University positions AberInnovation to extend the UK's open-access map westward, complementing rather than duplicating the large single-site capacity concentrated in North East/North West England and Scotland.
For the pilot-to-scale up bottleneck that the report identifies as the most acute constraint facing UK engineering biology, AberInnovation already offers integrated fermentation and DSP capability, open access, and embedded academic expertise, the exact combination the report says is missing.