It ‘takes a village’ to build something huge
Eden Brew is making animal-free dairy that is good for humans and good for the planet. The company was co-founded by Main Sequence, CSIRO (Australia’s national science agency), Norco (Australia’s biggest dairy co-op) and ex-Woolworths exec, Jim Fader.
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In February 2020, I wrote to James Petrie, the CEO of Nourish Ingredients, to explore the idea of making animal-free milk. I wondered how much we could make in Australia if we brewed it using precision fermentation with Australian crops as a feedstock.
Like meat, scaling animal agriculture to make twice as much milk/butter/ice cream/cheese/yoghurt over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible given the planetary resources we would need to grow the food. This is one of the big ideas behind our Feed 10b People challenge at Main Sequence where we are looking for companies that can make twice as much food while using half the planet.
This question to James is where the Eden Brew journey started. Our ‘back-of-the-envelope’ calculation revealed something staggering and I’ll tell you what that was at the end. But it was enough to begin our Venture Science work at Main Sequence to design and shape a new company to go after the opportunity.
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First we needed to assemble the founder team.
Cue Ocean’s 11 soundtrack…
For this job, the science is hard, creating a new food brand is hard, building scale and distribution is hard.
The science at the heart of Eden Brew comes from CSIRO. Australia’s national science agency (and Main Sequence’s founding partner) has decades of experience in both the protein engineering and the dairy processing which Eden Brew needs to make milk that can be poured onto Weetbix without the kids noticing.
Eden Brew will be making their milk using a practice known as precision fermentation in which yeast produces the proteins that are normally made inside a cow. These proteins then need to be re-assembled into the creamy-white stuff that froths in lattes, clots in stomachs to keep us full and transforms into cheese and other dairy products.
One product that is already made at scale in this way is insulin for treating diabetes. Imagine this, before precision fermentation, insulin was extracted from pigs and took 8 tonnes of pig pancreas for every litre of insulin. That’s a lot of pigs. This new way is much better!
Next we needed processing, distribution and the generational expertise of a dairy company. We found this in our Industry Founder, Norco. Norco is the biggest dairy co-op in Australia. Based in northern New South Wales, Norco was established over 100 years ago and includes over 200 member farms each producing over 1m litres of milk per year. This milk is processed and transformed at Norco into packaged milk, ice-cream, butter and cheese before being distributed to Australian retailers.
I met Jim Fader while he was General Manager at Foodco Fresh at Woolworths. He introduced me to the incredible innovation that is going on in food retail and helped another one of our companies — v2food — understand what it needed to do to succeed on the shelves. When he left Woolworths we grabbed him for Eden Brew where he has got back to his startup roots and now leads the company as CEO.
The founder team was in place. We had the team to imagine, discover, build, process and ship the products of Eden Brew. No one of us could do it alone, but together we had everything we needed.
And now we are working. At a phenomenal speed. We’ve already tasted Eden Brew milk (have a look at the photo at the start of this post) and we’ve started the journey to scale.
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And what was written on the back-of-the-envelope that James pulled together? If we used Queensland’s sugar cane harvest to create brewed milk, we could double the world’s milk supply. Yep. Australia, the ‘food deli’ of the world, making a small amount of food for massive global markets has the natural resources to be a player on the world stage. And dairy is racing towards becoming a trillion dollar industry — if only we can make enough.
As Eden Brew improves the efficiencies of its platform, it may have lower or higher yields than our estimates in 2020. But either way, we can make a LOT of milk.
Science is a wonderful thing.