Exclusive: Elbow Beach inks £1.5M into UPP to automate broccoli waste-to-protein tech

UPP Receives £1.5M Investment from Elbow Beach for Upcycled Broccoli Protein

23.10.2025

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Elbow Beach Ventures

Vegconomist

UPP Secures £1.5M in New Investment and Achieves Key Milestones in Sustainable Ingredient Scale-Up

UPP FREYA

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£1.5M Investment in Food-Tech Pioneer, UPP

UPP Secures first-time BRCGS Grade A

UPP FREYA

05.02.2026

Upcycled Plant Power (UPP) Ltd announced the completion of new investment and the achievement of several significant milestones in its journey toward commercial scale-up, regulatory certification, and international expansion.

Driven by a mission to make food systems more sustainable, UPP is developing clean-label, planet-positive protein and fibre ingredients while helping broccoli farmers overcome their biggest constraint: harvest labour. By also improving yield efficiency and profitability, UPP is redefining value from field to fork. The company was also one of the first industrial partners of the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC).

Building on this foundation, UPP has achieved ISO 9001 certification for the production of its Automated Selective Harvester (‘Harvesta’), a self-powered robotic system that identifies market-ready broccoli heads in real time. The 2025 Harvesta model, recently trialled in Lincolnshire and Scotland, can harvest three rows simultaneously at speeds of up to 5 km/h. By automating what has traditionally been a manual process, it transforms the harvest economics of broccoli while capturing valuable side-streams for ingredient production.

Alongside its advances in automation, UPP has completed a pilot plant capable of processing 10 tons of broccoli side-stream per day, producing up to 4 tons of high-quality Fiba™ (fibre) and Prota™ (protein) ingredients. The facility is now in the final three-month work-up toward achieving Brand Reputation through Compliance Global Standard (BRCGS) certification, which is the globally recognised benchmark for food safety and quality and was formerly known as the British Retail Consortium (BRC). UPP expects to secure BRCGS status by January 2026, enabling the start of shipments to several of the 18 major food manufacturers that have already trialled its ingredients. Products featuring UPP’s ingredients are anticipated to reach supermarket shelves in H1 2026, with plans to scale production beyond 100 tons per day in the future.

An independent Life Cycle Analysis confirmed that UPP’s protein has a materially lower CO₂ footprint than soy or pea protein and significantly outperforms pork and beef. The company will soon publish further analysis quantifying methane emissions avoided, demonstrating that its ingredients are genuinely planet positive.

With innovation at the core of its development strategy, UPP has already secured one granted patent family, filed another patent, and submitted three more, with several additional applications now being prepared. These patents span both the harvesting and upcycling processes, reflecting the depth of UPP’s technology and its collaboration with leading institutions including the James Hutton Institute, Harper Adams University, and the UK Agri-Tech Centre.

To drive the next phase of growth, UPP has strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of Dr. Trisha Toop as Chief Technology Officer and Patrick Cohen as Chief Financial Officer, as part of their expansion from seven to twelve team members. The enhanced team will accelerate delivery in the UK, allowing the CEO to focus on planned expansion in the United States and on developing new product lines to maximise both environmental and economic returns from brassica side-streams.

To support this momentum, UPP has secured £1.5 million in new investment from Elbow Beach Ventures, together with the conversion of £1.45 million in existing loans to equity, bringing total investment to £3.6 million. This has been complemented by £1.38 million in government grants, with £0.6 million still to be drawn, supporting the company through to its first commercial revenues.

Mark Evans, CEO of UPP, said: “UPP is redefining how plant-based ingredients are produced by using the crops we already grow, without the need for additional land, water, or emissions. Our technology transforms what was once agricultural waste into cost-effective, nutritious, and hypoallergenic food ingredients. In doing so, we are helping farmers improve profitability, supporting manufacturers in meeting sustainability goals, and contributing to a healthier planet.”

Helen Brookes, Engagement Director at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said “UPP is a good example of the innovation and collaboration that define the future of UK agriculture and food production. By combining advanced automation with circular bioeconomy principles, they are showing how cutting-edge agri-tech can deliver meaningful impact. Their work demonstrates how technology can turn agricultural challenges, like labour shortages and crop waste, into new opportunities for value creation, sustainability and global opportunity. At the UK Agri-Tech Centre, we are proud to have supported UPP from the outset of the business and to see their ongoing success advancing the resilience of our sector.”

Professor Stewart of the James Hutton Institute, Co-Director of the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) and an advisor to UPP said: “UPP’s progress is a powerful example of how UK innovation can accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and resilient food system. As one of NAPIC’s founding industrial partners, UPP has shown how cutting-edge science, automation, and circular thinking can be combined to deliver real-world impact, reducing waste, lowering emissions, and creating new sources of clean, nutritious protein. Their achievements demonstrate the strength of the UK’s alternative protein ecosystem and the value of collaboration between industry, academia, and government in driving the next generation of sustainable food technologies.”

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ABOUT UPCYCLED PLANT POWER (UPP) LTD (‘UPP’): UPP provides sustainable, clean-label, low-allergenic plant fibre and protein ingredients for food manufacturers seeking to decarbonise their products. By pairing automated broccoli harvesting with upcycling of the 70% of the plant typically discarded, UPP transforms a high-waste crop into a dual-revenue system that cuts Scope 3 emissions and supports UK food security, nutrition, and affordability goals.

ABOUT ELBOW BEACH CAPITAL: Elbow Beach Ventures is a UK-based investment firm backing high-growth clean technology companies that deliver measurable environmental impact, focusing on scalable solutions such as advanced EV batteries, CO₂-to-product innovations, and agricultural waste reduction to support technologies with the potential to transform industries.

ABOUT UK AGRI-TECH CENTRE: The UK Agri-Tech Centre are the only full-chain agricultural innovation centre in the UK, focussed on supporting commercially viable agriculture solutions and driving their adoption. The UK Agri-Tech Centre works alongside food producers, SMEs, industry, government and world-class research institutions to accelerate impactful agri-tech innovation.

ABOUT NAPIC: The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) is an Innovation Knowledge Centre (IKC) funded by BBSRC, Innovate UK, national and international partners including academia, industry, regulators, and third sector. NAPIC are a dynamic nexus of innovators working to leverage the UK’s world-leading science and innovation strengths in alternative proteins.

BRCGS Grade A: What this milestone really signals about UPP

In food manufacturing, milestones matter less for what they say - and more for what they prove. So when UPP achieved BRCGS Food Safety certification (provisional, pending certification) with a Grade A, it would be easy to treat it as a routine compliance update. In reality, it’s a much clearer signal of something more important: UPP is now operating as a procurement-grade ingredient supplier - not a promising technology project. This isn’t just about meeting a standard. It’s about demonstrating that our harvest-to-ingredient platform can deliver repeatable, specification-controlled, food-grade supply under the requirements that major manufacturers and retailers actually use.

Why Grade A matters

BRCGS certification is widely recognised as a baseline requirement for supplying large food manufacturers and retail-facing products. But achieving a Grade A matters because it indicates that food safety and quality systems aren’t being “bolted on” at the end - they’re embedded in day-to-day operations. In practical terms, this certification confirms that UPP has:

• Food safety systems that are operational, not improvised

• Full traceability and specification control at operating scale

• The discipline required to perform reliably under third-party audit

• A foundation that customers can onboard with confidence

For our customers, that translates into something simple: UPP can now be treated as a serious long-term supply partner.

What BRCGS actually enables

This milestone matters because it unlocks commercial pathways that are otherwise closed to early-stage ingredient businesses. With BRCGS certification in place, UPP can supply ingredients that are used in products sold through:

• mainstream retail

• foodservice

• Tier 1 manufacturer supply chains

In other words, this is the point where UPP moves from “trial-stage potential” to commercial-scale manufacturability — the threshold that determines whether a new ingredient platform can actually scale.

A milestone that comes in the right order

One reason this matters is the sequencing.

UPP did not pursue certification first and hope operations would catch up later.

Instead, we focused on getting the system working in practice — commissioning, validating, and running early commercial shipments — and then locked in certification once the operating cadence was stable.

That order matters, because it means:

• compliance is built into the process, not layered on top

• quality is repeatable, not dependent on heroics

• scale becomes a matter of replication, not reinvention

What this reveals about how UPP is being built

UPP is designed around a simple idea: Unlock more value per tonne of crop input — without building a capital-heavy business that depends on constant fundraising.

Our production facility integrates the full harvest-to-ingredient stack:

• automated harvest inputs

• capital-efficient processing

• specification-grade ingredient outputs

• traceability and quality controls designed for real food manufacturing systems

And crucially, the site is built to support disciplined scale-up through replication of proven modules, rather than bespoke one-off expansion. That matters in today’s market, because:

• capital is expensive

• buyers want reliability, not experiments

• the winners will be the companies that can scale without burning cash

Why this matters beyond UPP

This isn’t just a story about one certification.

It’s a signal of what “good execution” looks like in this phase of the cycle.

Across foodtech, ag-tech, and alternative proteins, the last few years rewarded speed and ambition. But in today’s environment, the question has changed:

What risks have you actually retired — and how efficiently did you do it?

BRCGS Grade A is meaningful because it closes a major category of risk:

not just “is it safe?”

but “can it be run reliably, repeatedly, and commercially?”

What comes next

BRCGS Grade A is not the end goal. It’s a gate.

It enables the next phase of UPP’s commercial rollout - expanded supply, deeper partnerships, and downstream product launches - built on a procurement-grade foundation.

We’ll continue to focus on the same principles that got us here:

• disciplined sequencing

• capital efficiency

• operational reliability

• and building optionality through execution, not spending

Because in food manufacturing, the most valuable milestones are the ones that prove the business is real.

If you’re a food manufacturer looking for scalable, low-impact protein and fibre ingredients that integrate into existing recipes without compromising taste or cost, we’d love to speak.

Request samples or start a technical conversation with our team.