Billionaire investor Jim Mellon has revealed plans to bring large-scale “clean food” manufacturing to the Middle East, positioning the UAE as a future global hub for precision-fermented proteins and oils and potentially transforming food security in one of the world’s most import-dependent regions.
Mr Mellon, whose portfolio spans longevity science and large-scale food technology, said his group is working with sovereign wealth funds, family offices and food manufacturers to establish local production capacity.
“I think in the early new year, we’ll have something that we can announce to the world,” Mr Mellon, the chairman of Burnbrae Group and the founder of food security investment and operations platform New Agrarian, told The National at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
Geopolitical urgency and commercial opportunity are motivators for the Middle East push. The UAE imports around 95 per cent of its food, according to government data and Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates.
Mr Mellon said clean-food technologies could dramatically reduce that vulnerability.
“My view is that Abu Dhabi, the UAE in general could be producing all its protein requirements within 10 years and not having to import anything,” he said.
Why the UAE, and why now?
Mr Mellon said the region offers a rare alignment of need, capital and political will.
“The main reason that we’re here is the confluence of novel technology,” he said. “The second is the vision … and then the third is the speed of implementation and the capital.” Reliance on imports is a key driver, he added.
Burnbrae Group chairman and New Agrarian founder
The UAE has already made steps in this direction, with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (Adio) signing an agreement with New Agrarian in October to explore the development of large-scale protein fermentation. It also teamed up with protein companies The Every Company, a Burnbrae investee, and Vivici in the same month with plans to use microorganisms to create high-value food ingredients.
Food security is not only a regional concern, but increasingly a global one. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that conflict-related disruptions, from Ukraine to the Middle East, have highlighted the fragility of long supply chains.
Precision fermentation
At the core of Mr Mellon’s strategy is “clean food”, produced through precision fermentation and cellular agriculture. Precision fermentation is essentially an advanced brewing process used to make bioidentical food ingredients without animals or large-scale farming.
The biotech method uses microorganisms such as yeast, bacteria or fungi that are genetically programmed to produce specific molecules such as essential proteins, fats, enzymes or vitamins in a controlled environment.
Initially, precision fermentation targets ingredients rather than whole foods. This includes egg whites for baking, dairy powders and oils.
“They’re identical foods … there's no chemical difference,” Mr Mellon said, and any harmful materials can be removed.
Cellular agriculture is the production of animal-based foods by growing animal cells directly in controlled environments, rather than raising and slaughtering animals.
Precision fermentation is already widely used, but for more lucrative industries such as pharmaceuticals. “People who are on Ozempic or who are on Mounjaro, those drugs are produced by using precision fermentation,” Mr Mellon said. That is one of the reasons there is not very much capacity to make food, he added.
“All the capacity was bought up basically by [pharmaceutical companies Eli] Lilly and by Novo [Nordisk] and so it’s very hard to get hold of this stuff, which is why we’re building our own factories.”
According to industry analysts, global precision-fermentation capacity is expected to expand rapidly after 2030, but Mr Mellon says commercial scale is arriving sooner.
Is anyone buying it?
Mr Mellon emphasised that precision-fermented foods are already being produced at commercial scale. “So this is not science fiction … they’re being produced at approximately the same price of the current foods that we’re buying in the supermarket.”
Cellular agriculture, however, remains more expensive because it is still produced at small scale. Lab-grown meat is closer in price to organic products than low-cost supermarket meat, but prices are “coming down all the time” as production scales up.
Burnbrae Group chairman and New Agrarian founder
New Agrarian operates factories in the UK and US, with more planned. “The factory that we have in Liverpool, next year will produce the equivalent of 7 per cent of the UK palm oil market,” he said. Output will rise to “700 million litres a year” within three years.
All output is pre-sold under long-term agreements, reducing investor risk, Mr Mellon said. “It’s not just building a factory and hoping that someone comes along and buys it.”
Clean-food infrastructure is also being pitched as a high-return asset class. He said infrastructure investment “would typically make seven to 8 per cent per annum”.
“We think that these projects can make 20 per cent per annum without using leverage.”
Major food companies are paying attention, he added. “Nestlé, Unilever, Kellogg’s, they can see they can’t get enough food from conventional sources,” he said, citing deforestation pressures and sustainability limits.
Food insecurity globally is rising, and this biotech can provide affordable food for developing countries, said Mr Mellon. “This food is cheaper than the stuff that you buy in the supermarket today, because the cost of input is less than that of conventional farming.”
“It's not just about the greater good. The capitalist mentality can see there's an opportunity to make money here,” he added.
Human investment
The implementation of clean food at scale does not only have the potential to be lucrative but to also reduce the human cost.
In some countries, around 80 per cent of medically important antibiotics are consumed in the animal sector, largely in food-producing livestock according to the World Health Organisation. It has warned that this level of agricultural use is a major driver of antimicrobial resistance. It has regularly called for an end to routine antibiotic use in healthy animals.
As a result, “the next pandemic could be as a result of what we call AMR, antimicrobial resistance”, said Mr Mellon.
Diet-related disease is another concern. “Seventy per cent of the diet in the United States is processed foods,” he said, echoing US public-health data. He also pointed to China’s rising diabetes rates as western diets spread
“In the space of 45 years, the percentage of the population in China with diabetes has gone up 13 times.”
Global agrifood systems, the full cycle of food production from farming to distribution and consumption, makes up about 30 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, reported the The Food and Agriculture Organisation. “Which is the biggest element of destruction to the environment,” said Mr Mellon.
For the UAE, the strategic prize is resilience. Local production would cut emissions from transport, reduce exposure to geopolitical shocks and create high-skill manufacturing jobs. Mellon believes the region could move faster than Europe or North America. “I fully expect that we’ll have something very exciting to announce next year,” he said.
If that timeline holds, the Middle East may soon move from food-import dependency to a leading role in the global clean-food transition, added Mr Mellon.
