Victoria’s New Plant Protein Hub Joins ANZ’s Growing Future-Food Club

Victoria, Australia has just given plant-based protein a serious upgrade, opening a $12 million Plant Protein Hub and glasshouse at Agriculture Victoria’s Horsham SmartFarm. This isn’t a token ribbon-cut, it’s a fully kitted-out engine-room with shared labs, a test kitchen, analytical gear and grower access, built to turn lentils, chickpeas and field peas into the next wave of high-protein products.

Crucially, the Horsham Plant Protein Hub joins a growing club of ANZ innovation centres that are quietly wiring together a regional future-food network. In Australia, RMIT’s new E2Crop Hub in Melbourne is building intelligent, energy-efficient protected cropping systems, while CSIRO’s Food Innovation Centre and $50m pilot plant at Werribee give founders extrusion lines, precision-fermentation infrastructure and processing firepower to turn those crops into formats consumers actually buy.

Across the Tasman, New Zealand’s Food Innovation Network hubs – the FoodBowl (Auckland), Food Waikato (Hamilton), FoodPilot (Massey, Palmerston North), FoodSouth (Lincoln) and FoodSouth Otago (Dunedin) – plus the FoodHQ cluster in Manawatū, already act as open-access testbeds for new foods, including plant-based and functional products. Put Horsham on that map and you don’t just have a regional glasshouse; you’ve got another node in an emerging trans-Tasman plant-protein highway.

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