What nobody has measured

In one paragraph. This is the list of everything this study could not answer, with the cheapest way to close each one. Thirty-six open questions, of which eleven close with a single phone call, email or free download. Codes carry a topic prefix. Questions that were closed or partly closed during the study are kept and marked as such, because a closed question is useful evidence too. Where an external review has offered an answer that has not been verified, that is noted in the status column: an unverified answer moves a question closer to closing without closing it.

Regulation#

Three questions. The first two are the same letter, and they gate everything else in this report.

ID	Open question	Status	Why it matters	Cheapest way to close it
R-G1	Legal status of a novel protein ingredient under Decree 15/2018	Open. Unanswerable from the academic literature, which has nothing on Vietnam	It is the binding constraint on the whole study	Action 1
R-G2	How a novel single raw material joins the permitted circulation list, and whether khảo nghiệm applies	Open, and now the most urgent question in this report. An external review answers it as Article 11 of Decree 13/2020, requiring toxicological profiling and formal trials over 12 to 18 months, on the same source this study found silent and with no citation for the timeline	The regulatory path for the recommended first market. Until it is answered, no plan should assume a fast feed route. See R-C2	Action 3. The Article 11 citation is checkable against the decree text today at no cost; the timeline is not
R-G3	Whether an A. oryzae biomass product on a food-grade substrate is treated as a novel food or as a processed food under Article 4	Open	Potentially the fastest route to a marketable Vietnamese alternative protein product in the entire project	Action 2

Fermentation#

Ten questions about growing protein in a tank.

ID	Open question	Status	Why it matters	Cheapest way to close it
F-G1	Capital cost for fermentation capacity	Partly closed. Eight benchmark figures are carried with their basis, but none is a food-grade sterile protein plant	Capital intensity is a full scoring column and the first question any investor or ministry asks	Obtain the full text of Risner et al. 2023 and Fasihi et al. 2025, the two closest models. Separately, ask Hawkwood Biotech through GFI APAC for the cost model behind the nine-country study
F-G2	Tropical cooling penalty	Partly closed, with a first external estimate on record. No published study gives a tropical correction factor. An external review estimates USD 0.095 to 0.12 per kilogram of biomass from 14 to 16 MJ/kg of metabolic heat at a chiller coefficient of performance of 3.5; the arithmetic checks out and the physical argument holds, but it is a desk estimate with no citation	Decides whether cheap Vietnamese electricity survives contact with year-round cooling duty. On present numbers it may not: see 10.7	Action 13, which still stands. An engineering estimate of chiller duty for a 100 cubic metre fermenter at 30 degrees ambient against 12 degrees. One competent process engineer, one afternoon
F-G3	Precision fermentation titers and readiness	Closed for published work. 16 processes tabulated with hosts, titers, modes and scales	Was the unscored dimension on three scoring rows	Nothing further from the literature. The remaining gap is commercial titers, which are deliberately undisclosed
F-G4	Vietnam's installed industrial fermentation volume	Open. Only Vedan's claim of 700 cubic metre tanks	Determines whether a first entrant could have a product made under contract rather than building	Vedan Vietnam in Dong Nai and Ajinomoto Vietnam in Bien Hoa: ask for tank count and working volume, or estimate from environmental impact assessment filings, which are public
F-G5	Cassava glucose as a precision fermentation feedstock	Substantially closed on technical feasibility, open on cost. 82 to 94 dextrose equivalent achieved, one recombinant enzyme produced on cassava glucose, no food protein and no cost comparison	Would convert Vietnam's weakest scored input into a strength	Action 15
F-G6	Whether artificial intelligence meaningfully accelerates this field	Closed. Tested in section 13.1: real, narrow, best evidenced as a 40 to 80 percent media cost reduction, and does not change the ranking	One of the four claims tested in chapter 14	Nothing further
F-G7	Two key techno-economic papers reachable only at abstract level	Open. Risner et al. 2023 on mycoprotein in continuous airlift with over 340 model inputs, and Karamerou et al. 2020 on microbial oil	These are the closest published analogues to a Vietnamese bulk fermentation business case, and one explicitly targets price parity with beef protein	Action 12
F-G8	No cassava single-cell protein process above bench scale	Open. The largest documented is a bench-scale bioreactor plus on-farm solid-state systems	The scale-up risk sits exactly where Vietnam's feedstock advantage is	A pilot proposal is the honest answer. Cheaper interim step: ask the authors of the cassava peel hydrolysate work what limited their scale
F-G9	No Vietnamese site appears in any location-sensitive life cycle assessment	Open. Behm et al. modelled New Zealand, Germany, the United States and Australia, with impacts varying by a factor of three	A Vietnamese figure would be publishable and useful to the policy argument. It would not change a capital allocation decision, and should be funded as advocacy rather than as research	Action 14
F-G10	Methanotrophic protein on biogas: the whole line	Open. The search failed as a tool error, not as a negative result. An external review argues the route is unviable in Vietnam on flammability and hydrogen sulfide grounds, unsourced	Vietnam has a large distributed biogas base and offshore gas, and this route has real commercial precedent	Action 18, which should test the flammability and H2S hypotheses specifically

Crops and feedstocks#

Eleven questions about what Vietnam actually has, and what it costs at the gate.

ID	Open question	Status	Why it matters	Cheapest way to close it
CF-G1	The tonnage of cassava pulp and peel generated annually in Vietnam is not published	Open. An external review offers 1.7 to 2.1 Mt wet, about 400 to 500 kt dry, at a pulp yield of 10 to 15 percent of wet root mass. Those two halves do not reconcile: 10 to 15 percent of the 8.62 Mt processed is 0.86 to 1.29 Mt, and the stated tonnage implies 16 to 20 percent of the whole national crop	The single most important number in this chapter, because it sizes the only genuinely available feedstock, and the one this report most wants	Action 4. The Vietnam Cassava Association and the ASEAN Cassava Centre hold processing data, or ask three starch factories for pulp output per tonne of root and multiply by throughput
CF-G2	No Vietnamese factory-gate prices for cassava pulp, rice bran, molasses or straw	Open. An external review gives cassava pulp at USD 15 to 25 per tonne wet, uncited	Without a price, the competing-use column is qualitative and no business case can be built. This is the number that decides whether "free waste feedstock" survives contact with the market	Ask the same starch factories and a feed mill. Vietnamese feed ingredient traders quote these routinely
CF-G3	The rice bran balance does not reconcile: roughly 3.5 to 4.3 Mt implied against 730,000 t recorded as feed demand	Open	A factor-of-five discrepancy in a major residue stream	Action 9. Ask specifically whether the USDA figure covers only industrial compound feed
CF-G4	Delivered Vietnamese prices for imported soybean meal and corn	Open. An external review gives delivered soybean meal at Cai Mep and Ho Chi Minh City at USD 350 to 450 per tonne across 2024 to 2025, unverified	This is the price a locally-fed microbial protein must beat, and therefore the go or no-go number for the feed case	Action 5
CF-G5	Pairing a carbon-rich cassava residue with a nitrogen-rich seafood side stream	Partly closed. Section 11.6 found co-feeding works but does not outperform mineral nitrogen on yield or cost, and raw seafood waste brings salt and spoilage organisms into a sterile process	Cassava pulp at 0.93 percent protein needs nitrogen, and Vietnam generates a million tonnes a year of nitrogen-rich seafood residue, both concentrated in the south	Remaining question is a Vietnamese cost comparison: approach a Mekong Delta pangasius processor and a Tay Ninh starch mill. A cheaper first step is to price urea locally and compute the nitrogen line directly
CF-G6	Coffee husk, coconut and fruit processing side stream volumes are not quantified for Vietnam	Open	Coffee alone is a 1.9 million tonne crop and its residues are unmapped here	Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association, and the provincial statistics for Dak Lak and Ben Tre
CF-G7	No cost per tonne of sugar for any pretreatment route on rice straw or bagasse	Open	Decides whether woody feedstock is ever viable in Vietnam. Currently it is an open question presented as an opportunity	The pretreatment techno-economic literature exists but was not reached at full text. A targeted search on pretreatment economics rather than pretreatment chemistry would probably find it
CF-G8	Whether the roughly 30 percent of bagasse described as excess is real	Open	If real, it is a large dry concentrated residue with a weak competing claim on it, which would change the bagasse verdict	Read the Agronomy paper properly, then check against two Vietnamese sugar mills
CF-G9	Whether food-grade soy is heavily sourced from the United States	Open. The USDA annual does not split by end use	It is a specific claim in the project's working hypotheses and will be quoted	Vietnam Customs or UN Comtrade at HS 1201 disaggregated by end use, or the USDA FAS Hanoi post directly
CF-G10	Delivered price of fishmeal in Vietnam, and fishmeal inclusion rate by species, against the modelled cost of microbial protein at Vietnamese input prices	Open. Widened in this version. An external review gives fishmeal rising from USD 1,600 to USD 1,825 per tonne, and species-level inclusion rates, both unverified	The single decisive number for the recommended first market, and the inclusion rates are what the market-size correction in chapter 9 rests on	Action 5, which should now ask for both in the same call
CF-G11	Vietnamese brewer's spent grain tonnage, current buyer and gate price	Open	The tonnage figure in this report is arithmetic from a sourced rate and a sourced beer volume, not a measured stream	Action 6

Plant protein#

Nine questions about extracting protein from crops, and from duckweed.

ID	Open question	Status	Why it matters	Cheapest way to close it
NP-G1	Vietnamese production volumes for mung bean and sesame	Open	These are the two candidates excluded on absence from USDA reporting rather than on a measured figure. An external reviewer argues the exclusion is safe regardless, since neither crop has mechanised harvest or extraction infrastructure in Vietnam	Action 8, which is cheap but low priority
NP-G2	Cashew processing tonnages, and the size of the broken-kernel stream	Open	Cashew is the only allergen-carrying candidate whose Vietnamese scale might be large enough to overcome the objection	Action 7
NP-G3	Cereal and legume complementation: does blending measurably raise DIAAS, and by how much	Closed with a qualified negative. Section 13.2: improvement well supported, a measured blend score at or above 100 absent from the evidence	Vietnam's two scale crops are rice and cassava, and rice protein is lysine-limited	Closed. The remaining work is to measure it, which is action 16
NP-G4	No cost per kilogram for rice bran protein at any purity	Open	Without it, the candidate that passes the scale test cannot be costed against imported soy protein isolate	The small-scale concentrate process paper has cost estimates; get the full text. Otherwise a process engineer can cost the alkaline route from the published yields
NP-G5	Whether heat-stabilised Vietnamese rice bran is available as a separated stream at all	Open	The whole rice bran protein case assumes bran is collected and stabilised	Action 9. Same question as CF-G3
NP-G6	No Vietnamese work on any of these proteins was found	Open	Every finding in that chapter is therefore a transfer assumption	A literature search restricted to Vietnamese institutions, which the fermentation round showed is cheap and informative even when it returns little
NP-G7	Vietnamese broken rice volume and factory-gate price	Open. An external review gives 1.5 to 2.5 Mt a year at 7.5 to 8.5 percent protein, unverified	Broken rice is the leading rice-protein entry point and its scale is unestablished. USDA reports rice bran and broken rice together at 730,000 tonnes of feed demand, which cannot be the whole stream given 26.95 Mt milled	Action 9. A rice exporter or miller quotes broken rice price and grade split routinely
NP-G8	Whether any Vietnamese duckweed production exists beyond research plots, and at what scale	Open	Decides whether duckweed is a near-term feed opportunity or a greenfield one	Action 11
NP-G9	Whether duckweed grown on Vietnamese pangasius effluent meets feed safety limits for heavy metals and pathogens	Open, and the first thing to test on this candidate	Lemnaceae hyperaccumulate cadmium, arsenic and lead and take up enteric pathogens. This determines whether the closed-loop concept is legal as feed under QCVN 01-190:2020, before anyone asks about food	The 2020 Vietnamese pig wastewater duckweed study is the nearest existing work. Contact the authors

Cultivated meat and cross-cutting#

Three questions that sit outside the main categories.

ID	Open question	Status	Why it matters	Cheapest way to close it
CS-G1	Nagoya Protocol and access-and-benefit-sharing obligations for commercialising Vietnamese microbial strains	Open. This half of the question was never answered	If the project promotes indigenous strain prospecting, this is a legal precondition and nobody has checked it	Action 19. Vietnam's Biodiversity Law and its implementing decree, or one query to a Vietnamese intellectual property lawyer
CS-G2	Why Vietnam imports processed mushrooms and mushroom powder at rank 3 and 2 globally while producing 250,000 to 270,000 tonnes	Open	Not a protein question, but a large, specific, unexplained processing gap in an adjacent sector, and possibly a cheaper first business than any alternative protein category	The Vietnamese mushroom association, or the trade data behind the claim
CS-G3	Whether the existing ICAR-NBFGR pangasius cell lines can be obtained and adapted, and whether any Vietnamese institute holds its own	Open. Restated in this version. Continuous research lines for striped catfish and a hybrid shrimp line appear to exist already, which changes the question from whether a starting point exists to whether it can be accessed	Determines whether the cultivated research contribution starts from an existing line or from nothing, and it appears to be the former	Write to ICAR-NBFGR about the PHT and PHG accessions, and ask Research Institute for Aquaculture No. 2 and Can Tho University's aquaculture faculty what they hold

Questions for a later research round#

These are the literature questions that remain, as distinct from the phone calls above.

What is the delivered cost of cassava-derived glucose syrup at a Vietnamese factory gate, against imported corn glucose?
What cooling duty and energy penalty does a tropical ambient impose on industrial submerged fermentation compared with a temperate site, measured rather than estimated?
What RNA reduction, mycotoxin and amino acid digestibility protocols are required for microbial protein approval, and what do they cost at pilot scale?
Which contract fermentation providers in Southeast Asia accept food-grade third-party work, and at what minimum batch size?
What would a Vietnamese life cycle assessment of mycoprotein show, using the Vietnamese grid factor and local water scarcity?
What carbon-to-nitrogen ratio does a fungal biomass process actually need, and what does nitrogen supplementation cost per tonne of microbial biomass, as urea, ammonium sulfate or a protein-rich side stream?
Does the 40 degree Celsius molasses storage ceiling bind in southern Vietnam under normal tank conditions?
Does blending rice protein with a legume protein raise measured DIAAS, in what ratio, and by how much?
What would rice bran protein concentrate cost per kilogram at Vietnamese utility and labour prices, using published alkaline-route yields?
How large is the broken cashew kernel stream in Binh Phuoc, and is it currently sold as food or as feed?
What secondary metabolites does a candidate A. oryzae production strain make, and what would strain-level characterisation cost?