Pentasweet is building Europe's first factory for brazzein, a sweet protein nobody could produce at scale until now.
In April 2026, on a 1.2 hectare site at the Vilnius City Innovation Industrial Park, a biochemist named Danas Tvarijonavicius placed a small capsule into freshly poured concrete. It was a groundbreaking ceremony for a factory, but the substance the factory exists to make has nothing to do with construction. It is a protein, found in trace amounts in the pulp of a red berry that grows on a climbing shrub in the rainforests of Gabon and Cameroon, and it is roughly 1,500 times sweeter than sugar. For over three decades, that protein has sat in scientific journals and expired patents, undisturbed, because nobody could grow enough of the fruit to make it commercially relevant. Tvarijonavicius and his company, Pentasweet, think they have finally solved that problem, and they are betting sixty five million euros that they are right.
The fruit is called oubli, and the name itself is a clue to how potent its contents are. In French, oubli means "forgot." Communities along the Atlantic coast of Central Africa gave the berry that name because nursing infants who tasted its pulp would reportedly forget to return to their mothers for milk. Botanically, the plant is Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon, a climbing shrub that produces red globular berries about five centimeters across, each holding a handful of seeds wrapped in sweet red flesh.
Scientists first tried to isolate the sweetening compound in 1989, when researchers writing in the journal Chemical Senses described a sweet protein from the plant they named pentadin. The attempt to purify it further failed. Five years later, in 1994, a different group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison succeeded where the first had not, isolating and naming a 54-amino-acid protein they called brazzein, a nod to the Brazzaville region where Pentadiplandra brazzeana is found. Their paper in FEBS Letters reported that brazzein measured roughly 2,000 times sweeter than sucrose at low concentrations and that its sweetness survived four hours at 80 degrees Celsius, a stability that ordinary sugar substitutes do not have. Patents followed almost immediately: by the late 1990s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Institutes of Health, which had partly funded the research, held a cluster of US patents covering brazzein's isolation, its DNA sequence, and methods for producing it in recombinant hosts.
Then the trail goes cold for the better part of two decades. The patents existed. The protein's structure was known down to its four disulfide bonds. What did not exist was a way to make it in quantities anyone could sell. Oubli grows wild and scattered through equatorial forest, harvesting the fruit at any volume is impractical, and the protein occurs in such small amounts within each berry that extraction was never going to be the path to a commercial ingredient. For a sweet protein with patents older than some of the food scientists now working with it, brazzein remained a laboratory curiosity rather than a product.
Danas Tvarijonavicius is not a typical biotech founder chasing a hot trend. He spent more than two decades in industrial biotech and food processing before starting Pentasweet, including senior roles at Roquette Amilina, the Lithuanian arm of the French ingredients group Roquette, where he ran research and development and chaired the local board. That is the kind of background that produces engineers obsessed with manufacturing economics rather than headlines, and it shows in how Pentasweet talks about its own technology. Rather than trying to farm or extract more oubli, Tvarijonavicius and cofounder Saule Sudziuviene, the company's chief scientific officer, built a precision fermentation process: a genetically engineered, food-grade yeast strain that produces brazzein during fermentation, with no fruit and no farming involved at all. The final product, the company says, carries no trace of the engineered organism that made it.
Pentasweet was founded in 2022 and stayed founder-funded through its early development, an unusual choice in a sector where venture capital typically arrives well before groundbreaking. The capital for the industrial buildout came not from a venture fund but from ILTE, Lithuania's national development bank, in the form of an investment loan. According to Tvarijonavicius, the loan covers both the demonstration stage and an industrial expansion up to a capacity equivalent to 50,000 tons of sugar a year, with the company prepared to look at other options if market demand outpaces that ceiling. ILTE is wholly owned by the Lithuanian state, with an authorized capital of over half a billion euros, and it has increasingly positioned itself as a financing partner for the country's biotechnology buildout, having backed comparable life-sciences infrastructure such as Northway Biotech's cell-therapy manufacturing center in the same innovation park. Lithuania's Ministry of Economy and Innovation has designated the Pentasweet factory a major national investment project, and Vilnius Mayor Valdas Benkunskas turned up to the groundbreaking to call the city's concentration of biotechnology talent and infrastructure a draw for "high-value-added projects."
The construction itself is substantial: more than 8,000 square meters of precision fermentation infrastructure, heavily automated, expected to create around 30 specialized jobs spanning biotechnologists, process engineers, and automation specialists. Phase I is slated for completion in early 2027, with operations beginning in the first half of that year. Phase II will extend capacity further, and only once both phases are complete does the total investment reach the full 65 million euros, or roughly 76 million dollars.
To understand why a niche African sweet protein justifies a factory of this scale, it helps to look at what the natural high-intensity sweetener market has actually looked like for the past decade: stevia and monk fruit, and almost nothing else. Stevia, extracted from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana, has built itself into a market estimated at roughly 874 million dollars in 2025, while monk fruit sweetener, derived from a melon grown in southern China, sits in the range of several hundred million dollars and is forecast to keep growing at a double-digit pace. Together with other natural options, the broader natural sweeteners category was valued above 11 billion dollars in 2023. For over ten years, every major reformulation effort by a food or beverage company chasing sugar reduction has effectively had to choose between those two ingredients, or fall back on sugar alcohols and synthetic sweeteners with their own baggage.
Sweet proteins like brazzein offer something structurally different from either incumbent. As a pure protein, brazzein does not register on the glycemic index and, according to Pentasweet, does not disrupt the human gut microbiome the way some sugar alcohols can. Its potency means formulators need vanishingly small amounts, and because its sweetness is locked in by four internal disulfide bonds, it survives heat and a wide pH range without breaking down, a property neither stevia nor monk fruit extracts can fully match in every application. Tvarijonavicius has been candid about where the protein still struggles: high-acidity beverages are the hardest category, he says, because sweet proteins have a slower onset of sweetness than sugar, an effect formulators have to engineer around with blends rather than treat brazzein as a drop-in replacement everywhere.
Pentasweet is not the only company chasing this opportunity, and the competitive map is instructive. In the United States, California-based Oobli, formerly known as Joywell Foods, has built the most visible brazzein platform, having raised close to 50 million dollars in venture funding from backers including Khosla Ventures, Piva Capital, and Ingredion Ventures, and having struck a sugar-reduction partnership directly with Ingredion, one of the world's largest ingredient suppliers. Oobli became the first company to win an FDA "no questions" letter for brazzein produced via precision fermentation, a milestone that effectively cleared it to sell into the US market, and it has since added a GRAS letter for a second sweet protein, monellin. Other entrants include Nanjing Bestzyme, which uses a fungal production host rather than yeast and has likewise secured FDA clearance; Microfarmtory, whose CEO James Wu says the company has already built capacity for 30 metric tons of pure brazzein a year and is scaling toward 200 metric tons within two years; Perfect Day; and Sweegen, working through its production partner Conagen, which recently secured a separate flavor-industry safety designation for its own brazzein. None of these companies has publicly disclosed production volumes at the scale Pentasweet is targeting, and most of the activity to date has clustered around the US regulatory pathway rather than Europe's.
That regulatory split is the detail most coverage of this story misses, and it may matter more than the science. In the United States, the FDA's "Generally Recognized as Safe" framework can clear a novel ingredient for market in roughly a year. In the European Union, any ingredient not in meaningful use before May 1997 falls under the Novel Food Regulation, which requires a full safety dossier reviewed by the European Food Safety Authority. EFSA's statutory target is nine months for an opinion; in practice, an analysis of nearly 300 novel food applications submitted between 2018 and 2024 found the average time from submission to a published decision ran two and a half years, with some applications taking more than four. As of early 2026, by one industry estimate, zero precision-fermentation-derived proteins had cleared that EU process, even as multiple competitors had already won FDA clearance in the US. Pentasweet intends to file its EFSA dossier this year and is deliberately sequencing its commercial strategy around Europe first, saving a US filing for later, a bet that the company can win first-mover advantage in the one major market its better-funded American rivals have largely left unaddressed, even if it means waiting years longer than they did to sell a single gram.
One detail in Pentasweet's plans points to an ambition beyond just the sweetener itself. Precision fermentation, almost by definition, produces side streams: spent biomass, residual nutrients, and other byproducts of the fermentation tanks that most ingredient companies treat as waste to be disposed of. Pentasweet says it intends to route those side streams into biofuel production instead, turning a cost center into a second revenue line and building a circular-economy logic directly into the unit economics of the factory rather than bolting it on afterward as a sustainability initiative. It is the kind of detail that rarely makes a headline but tends to matter most when investors and lenders model out a facility's actual margins a decade from now.
The brazzein story is unusual because almost nothing about the underlying science is new. The protein was named in 1994. The patents describing how to make it recombinantly are old enough that some have already expired. What changed is not the chemistry but the economics of fermentation at industrial scale, the same shift that has made lab-grown alternatives to everything from leather to dairy proteins suddenly commercially plausible after years of being theoretically possible. Pentasweet's bet is that being the first company to put real industrial capacity behind brazzein in Europe, financed by pa…