Page 26 - Food&Drink magazine April 2022

ALTERNATIVE PROTEINS
opportunity. But it is the wrong way of looking at it. The market opportunity is the world. It’s a trillion-dollar opportunity of which less than one per cent will be consumed in Australia.
“Ultimately, we’re not a big country in that sense. But when your perspective is the global opportunity, then these really quite huge investments that are needed become a little bit more palatable because you can see that they make sense. But clearly you would never be making those investments if you only looked at the Australian market,” Hazell says.
CEO of precision fermentation company Eden Brew Jim Fader sees a lot of credible, talented businesses coming into the sector and says that will only increase.
“There’s a lot of money going into cool companies with great molecules like Eden Brew, but you need a solution to manufacture at scale if you’re going to compete with traditional goods on the shelf,” Fader says.
THINKING LATERALLY
Co-founder of cultured meat company VOW, Tim Noakesmith says the mathematical scenario to map commercial viability is one where the numbers “get crazy, really quickly”.
“Every year about 300 million tonnes of meat is produced
around the globe, which is just an unfathomable number when you think about it. We have these large tanks filled with liquid making meat that could replace that, so how many of these would we need?
“The answer ends up being around the equivalent of what we use to produce the world’s global supply of wine. And we all love wine, but we also love our meat.
“So, while it seems absurd to be able to grow tens of thousands of these large, 20,000 litre tanks to produce meat, it’s not dissimilar to what we have now for the global wine production.
“It is massive, and we need to think massive to have an impact. But it is absolutely doable,” Noakesmith says.
Fader reiterates the critical need for solutions to scale fermentation capacity.
“If you build a 10 plus million litre fermentation plant, it could be anywhere from $200 to $400 million, depending on the technology, the setup, the design, and the purification at the backend. That’s a lot of money, so you’re not going to get start-ups tripping over $400 million on the pavement and going, ‘I’ll build my own plant’,” he says.
Fader says it is about a continuation of the thinking differently, innovation mindset
that frames the whole industry. Eden Brew
is in advanced discussions with existing businesses that understand fermentation – farming, breweries, wineries – and
are interested in diversifying into food.
“It is a brave step
for them because it’s
not what they’re
used to doing, who’s
going to underwrite the capital expense and myriad factors. But if Eden Brew presents as an anchor tenant to a prospective industrial fermenter, business suddenly becomes a lot more viable,” Fader says.
For plant-based meat producers, the challenge when demand grows is ensuring the supply chain can keep up. It becomes a question of how you strengthen ingredient and manufacturing capacity to ensure the supply chain keeps up with demand.
Hazell says v2food has been looking into growing and extracting its own protein to avoid having to import ingredients for its range.
“It is a major capital investment. We have been working for two years with our
partners on protein extraction technology. At any given time, we’re running around
30 projects with researchers.
“This journey doesn’t stop until our products are cheaper, tastier, and more nutritious than traditional counterparts, and even then, it won’t stop,” Hazell said.
ProForm Foods CEO Matt Dunn echoes Hazell’s sentiment, saying Harvest Road’s investment will accelerate ProForm’s next growth phase, assist its existing production facilities, and strengthen its focus on using locally sourced ingredients.
Dunn says that while a lack of local demand for Australian- made inputs made investment in the sector harder to justify, regional demand for 100 per cent Australian ingredients and products is providing the business case. For ProForm, R&D on protein inputs and ingredient functionality is pushing the business to the next level of innovation.
“At the moment we’re ahead of the game in terms of commercialised, in the market technology, but we want to stay at the forefront,” Dunn says.
Back at FFT, Guggenheim Partners’ Spence said success relied on three things: R&D and food tech excellence to make quality products; good branding and selling strategy to sell the products; and production capabilities and supply chain systems to get them to market.
It turns out even the most sophisticated, newest foods rely on the age-old rules. ✷
“You don’t have to be an Einstein to know that the solution to needing to double our food supply is not to produce twice the amount of lamb, beef, pork and chicken, just like it’s not the solution to have twice the number of cars for transport.” Jan Pacas
All G Foods has launched a retail brand, Love Buds, as well as developing cow-free dairy using precision fermentation.
ABOVE RIGHT: v2foods has its sights on China and South-East Asia.
26 | Food&Drink business | April 2022 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au