The Bland Company

The Bland Company is a London-based food-technology and protein-science startup that uses a proprietary biochemical process to convert underused plant byproducts and agricultural side streams into functional proteins for industrial food manufacturing. Its ingredients are engineered to be soluble, foaming, gelling, binding and emulsifying while remaining flavor-neutral, positioning them as replacements for egg protein in bakery, sauces and condiments, beverages, snacks and confectionery.

The company frames the opportunity around the roughly one third of eggs that are consumed as an ingredient in food manufacturing, where dependence on poultry supply produces unstable availability, volatile pricing and food-safety concerns. Coverage of the company reports that egg prices swung two- to threefold over an 18-month period, driven by avian flu and Newcastle disease outbreaks, cage-free regulation rollouts, feed costs, climate shocks and seasonal demand, forcing manufacturers to reformulate and re-forecast. Existing alternatives are described as either underperforming or too costly: precision-fermentation egg proteins carry high capex and opex, Rubisco-based routes need expensive downstream processing, mung-bean options suit scrambled-egg formats more than baked goods, and other approaches require blends of starches and hydrocolloids alongside plant protein.

The company's platform is described as feedstock-agnostic, fractionating target proteins from cheap, abundant inputs such as rice-production and pasta-production byproducts (including rice bran) and then restructuring them to deliver animal-protein-like functionality. Reported early results include three-to-fourfold increases in solubility and significant improvements in foaming and emulsification, with first-generation ingredients said in some benchmarks to surpass egg-white performance. The process is characterized as clean-label and capital-light, involving no fermentation, bioreactors or novel equipment, and able to plug into existing plant-protein and food-manufacturing infrastructure; artificial intelligence is cited as a tool for predicting how different substrates respond to the biochemical process and for optimizing processing parameters.

Founding story

Co-founders Yash Khandelwal and Micol Hafez met at Entrepreneur First in London and started the business in 2024, motivated by the fragility of an animal-dependent food system and the belief that sustainable ingredients will only scale if they are cheaper, easier and better than incumbents. Khandelwal is described as a biochemical engineer/biochemist and founder of watermelon-seed paneer maker Funny Nani; Hafez is a biochemist and previously co-founder of women's health startup Womco. Both are characterized as repeat founders in ingredient innovation who set out to decompose food functionality to its fundamentals and rebuild it from underutilized agricultural streams.

Business model

Business-to-business ingredient supply. Upstream, the company partners with agri-commodity and finished-goods producers that generate protein-containing side streams, which it frames as converting a cost center into additional revenue streams via biorefinery models. Downstream, it intends to sell functional protein ingredients either through ingredient distributors or directly to consumer packaged goods manufacturers, slotting into existing procurement workflows. The stated long-term model is a biorefinery: one plant feedstock in, multiple high-performance functional ingredients out, serving food and potentially non-food applications, supported by an expanding library of proteins.

Sale of functional protein ingredients on a B2B basis, either via ingredient distributors or directly to consumer packaged goods manufacturers; the company emphasizes stable, year-round pricing and a path to cost parity with, or undercutting of, eggs.

Traction

Raised $2.67 million in pre-seed funding in February 2026. Reported benchmarks include three-to-fourfold solubility increases and significant foaming and emulsification gains, with first-generation ingredients said to surpass egg-white performance in some tests. The company is running pilot trials with large CPG companies in the US and Europe and working with large agri producers on rice- and pasta-production side streams. Team size is listed as 1-10 employees, with five named team members on its website.

Latest developments

In February 2026 the company announced its $2.67 million pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital with Entrepreneur First, Transpose Platform, Behind Genius Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Vento participating, to be used for hiring scientists and engineers, accelerating the protein functionalization platform and speeding commercialization of its first ingredients. It was concurrently validating its first solution for baked goods, condiments and confectionery through manufacturer pilots and progressing patent filings.