Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) play a key role in one of the most relevant historical partnerships: symbiosis with terrestrial plants. Fungi get the sweet products of photosynthesis and key lipids, while plants tap into the vast fungal underground network that effectively increases their access to water and minerals. The agronomic benefits of this relationship are significant, making AMF the core component of the biological fertilizers market. (Learn more about that in our blog piece: Benefits and Challenges of AMF).
Benefits of AMF are known for decades, the mycorrhiza biofertilizer market is yet to mature. Valued at $1.29 billion in 2025, with an estimated CAGR of 9.63% over the next five years [1], it is set to proliferate. Many new products are emerging, carrying promises of increased plant productivity and crop yield. However, the reality doesn’t seem to follow. A meta-analysis published in New Phytologist last year put a stark number on the gap between promise and reality: while 85% of lab-scale AMF products delivered the desired effects, only 16% of commercial-scale products performed the same [2].
That gap doesn’t stem from an inherent biology problem. It is rather a matter of quality and supply.
The Quality Bottleneck
AMF are living organisms, indicating that they come with a set of specific challenges in production and supply compared to the classic agronomic standards of very stable synthetic compounds. For a biological to perform, it is crucial that the organism stays viable over an extended time period and meets the challenges of environmental conditions before and after application. As such, quality in production is essential and even the smallest mistakes can be unforgiving. This has implications for companies already selling products and ones that are looking to enter the market.
For companies already selling mycorrhizal products, inconsistent supply quality means inconsistent field performance — and a slow erosion of customer trust, which is difficult to reestablish in the agricultural industry. On the other hand, companies seeking to add AMF to their portfolio are having a hard time achieving the required quality in manufacturing, making it their biggest obstacle to market entry. In both cases, the bottleneck sits in the same place: production.
Why AMF Manufacturing Has Been Lagging Behind
Most biological actives produced at scale today – Bacillus, Trichoderma, Rhizobia – are manufactured through submerged liquid fermentation. Scalable, cost-efficient, well understood. But AMF have different demands and cannot be produced the same way. As obligate biotrophs, mycorrhizal fungi require a living host root to produce viable propagules [3].
This leaves two established production routes, each with costly limitations:
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- Greenhouse cultivation: produces AMF in soil substrate with living host plants. Directly copy-pasting the nature’s way, this approach provides viable fungal material, but production cycles run months, contamination is more difficult to control, and scaling requires more physical space, proportionally more work and costs.
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- Conventional in vitro root organ culture (ROC) – Petri dishes, flasks, flat-bed systems: produces cleaner material under sterile conditions with a faster turnaround time. However, this setup shares the same scaling constraint as the previous approach, given that the output is tied to the surface area.
Combining scale-up costs with the manufacturing challenges, it is obvious why AMF supply has not kept pace with demand, and why product quality varies so widely across the market.
What Changes When AMF Grows in Three Dimensions
At Evologic, we spent eight years engineering a different approach: AMF production inside industrial bioreactors.
The core innovation is a bioreactor system that supports hairy root culture — living host roots that enable AMF colonization and sporulation inside a three-dimensional volume, under fully aseptic, controlled conditions. Scaling the production volumetrically and utilizing our manufacturing expertise, we are using the same principles that made fermentation-based biologicals commercially viable.
The results: we have produced 1,000 litres of AMF product in a single run, achieving spore concentrations 7× higher than the current state of the art, at lower unit costs. The technology is protected by a US patent and has been validated at the cubic-metre scale.
For those interested in the full technical picture — production landscape, scaling constraints of each method, and how bioreactor-based production addresses them — we published a detailed breakdown here: The Missing Link in AMF Commercialization.
What This Means for Your Product Pipeline
We built this technology to make high-quality AMF available at scale, not to keep it in-house.
Evologic produces AMF as a white-label active ingredient available to companies developing or already marketing mycorrhizal products.
What that looks like in practice:
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- If you already have AMF in your portfolio: We can be the production backbone behind your product — high-viability propagules, documented purity, and the batch-to-batch consistency that established production approaches struggle to deliver. Your brand, your formulation, our manufacturing.
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- If you are evaluating AMF as a new product line: The manufacturing barrier that has kept AMF difficult to commercialize reliably no longer applies. Bioreactor-based production gives you access to a high-quality AMF active ingredient without building production infrastructure from scratch.
In either case, the supply attributes are the same: aseptic production, controlled process parameters, scalable volume, and spore concentrations validated at multiples of the current market benchmark.
Let’s Talk Supply
If AMF is part of your product strategy — current or planned — we would welcome a conversation about what reliable, high-quality AMF supply could look like for your business.
Reach out and let’s talk supply: inquiry@evologic.at
References
[1] Mycorrhiza – Market Share Analysis, Industry Trends & Statistics, Growth Forecasts (2025 – 2030). Research and Markets.
[2] Koziol, L. et al. (2024). New Phytologist.
[3] Ghorui, M. et al. (2025). Frontiers in Industrial Microbiology.
