The actual content of the article is about the great increase in the price of whey protein concentrate since last summer, until now, apparently due to greatly increased demand for it.

Where I live, in the European Union, the price of whey protein concentrate had doubled around the beginning of 2026 and now it has reached even a triple price in comparison with a year earlier.

For a few years in the past, before the price increase, whey protein concentrate had been cheaper than the cheapest meat, per its content of protein. Now it has become about 50% more expensive than chicken breast, per protein content.

This is annoying for me, because where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat: sufficient daily protein intake, not exceeding the calories threshold that would cause rapid gain of weight and price not greater than an equivalent diet with meat (there are a lot of plant protein concentrates, but all are many times more expensive than cheap meat, at least here).

One way is to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, which is an activity that wastes too much time and too much water, the other way was to use whey protein concentrate as an ingredient for various dishes made from vegetables, to increase their protein content.

At the current price, the use of whey protein concentrate is no longer attractive, despite the fact that whey protein is the ideal source of protein, with optimum amino-acid composition and perfect digestibility.

The FT article believes that this sudden increase in the demand for whey protein concentrate was caused by the widespread use of drugs like Ozempic for weight loss, which also causes loss of muscular mass, leading to the use of protein supplements to prevent it, and also to the new US dietary guidelines, which recommend an increased consumption of protein (the old US recommendations for daily protein intake were notorious as much too low, i.e. they were at a level that prevents death, without ensuring good health, but the new recommendations might have jumped on the other side of an optimum intake).

The only possible positive consequence of this huge price increase is that it might convince some people to invest in the production of whey protein concentrate from cultures of genetically-modified fungi, instead of from cow milk. There already exists a strain of the fungus Trichoderma, whose genome was modified to secrete cow whey protein, instead of an enzyme secreted by the wild fungi.

Unlike with "lab-grown meat", there is no doubt that it will be possible to produce protein powders of whey protein or of egg-white protein in a cheaper way from fungal cultures than from milk or eggs.