Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:02 Speaker: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash day one. We're creating ethical, sustainable meat products that look, cook, and taste just like the traditional products because it is real meat. How much does it cost? 0:32 Alan Jones: To grow a kilo of lamb mince the traditional way versus the Magic Valley way. 0:38 Paul Bevan: Perception, I guess, of the industry, you know, over the past few years is that it's really expensive to produce, but that's really not the case anymore. 0:46 Speaker: What's going on with the decision to try and seek regulatory approval and go on sale in Australia first? Welcome to Pick My Brain, the podcast where we help startup founders improve their pitches to better connect with customers, co-founders, and investors. My name's Allan Jones, and I'm an ex-startup founder myself, huh, ages ago. But now I'm an angel investor with decades of experience helping startup founders find their footing and achieve their goals. But first, I'd like to acknowledge that this podcast is being recorded on Gadigal land, land that was never ceded. I pay my respects to their innovators and leaders, past, present, and emerging. On Pick My Brain, you'll hear the real story straight from founders as they pitch their startups, tackle the challenges we all face and try to take their ideas along towards a successful company. Each episode, we'll see if we can help these founders take their startups another step forward with advice, ideas, and maybe a little constructive criticism once in a while. Thanks for joining me. Let's get started. 1:43 Speaker: You're listening to a Day One FM show. Ever sat through security training and thought, none of this helps me ship code? Well, Galah Cyber gets it. The Foundations of Application Security course is built for Engineers who actually build things. 2 days, hands-on, and packed with lessons you can use the minute you're back at your desk. It's practical, it's relevant, and it'll make you better at your job, not just tick a box. Register your interest at galahcyber.com.au/learn for the 2026 intake. That's galahcyber.com.au/learn. 2:23 Alan Jones: Today we're joined by Paul Bevan, who's the founder of cultivated meat company Magic Valley. Thanks for joining the show, Paul. How are you? 2:31 Speaker: I'm great, thanks, Alan. Good to join you. 2:33 Alan Jones: Cool. Two standard questions I ask every guest on the show just to set some context so they can understand a little bit about the real Paul behind the pitch. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? 2:44 Speaker: Yeah, there's probably a few different things throughout my childhood. Probably like a lot of kids that grew up in Melbourne, I wanted to play Aussie rules football as a really young child. As a child. But after realizing I was no good at that, probably as I grew a bit older, something to do with business or actually politics. I was really interested in the political system, but also in business as well. I wasn't really sure what, but one of those two things sort of appealed to me. 3:13 Alan Jones: Cool. Okay. That kind of ties in, right? That ties in. How tall did you get? 3:18 Paul Bevan: I'm 6'1". Yeah, 6'1". 3:20 Alan Jones: Yeah. Just shy, right? Just shy. 3:22 Paul Bevan: I was probably that height when I was 12 or 13, and I sort of didn't grow after that. So I was quite good when I was younger, but yeah, skills deteriorated after that. 3:31 Alan Jones: Yeah, at the professional level, they are incredible athletes, aren't they? 3:34 Paul Bevan: Absolutely, yeah. 3:36 Alan Jones: Mate, what were you doing immediately before you started your startup founder journey? 3:41 Paul Bevan: Yeah, so I guess immediately before Magic Valley, I had two previous businesses. One was an online finance brokerage, and the other was a mixed martial arts gym. So Victoria's largest mixed martial arts gym. And before that, I was working at the banks for 7 or 8 years, primarily in analytics. So definitely not a straight path to food tech. 4:05 Alan Jones: No, no, I bet. So you know a little bit about how money works and also you can defend yourself against hostile investors. This is a little intimidating. 4:15 Paul Bevan: Something like that, yeah. 4:17 Alan Jones: Mate, the people who teach martial arts are always the most peaceful people and the least likely to get into a fight because you know exactly how things could go horribly wrong. 4:27 Paul Bevan: 100%, yep, totally agree with that. 4:29 Alan Jones: Paul, tell us about Magic Valley. You can do this pitch however you'd like, but let's imagine that we're both sitting across from each other in a Melbourne coffee shop. So, you know, no deck so the people listening to the audio can really hear what you're on about. So yeah, we're sitting in a busy Melbourne coffee shop. I'm sitting on a milk crate and my back's starting to hurt 'cause I'm an old man. Tell me about Magic Valley. 4:50 Paul Bevan: Oh, sure, no problem. So Magic Valley's obviously an Australian food tech company pioneering cultivated meat, which to those that don't know is real meat grown from animal cells without any animal slaughter involved. So using stem cell technology, we're creating ethical, sustainable meat products that look, cook, and taste just like the traditional products because it is real meat. And the question we get asked a lot is why are we doing this? And it's because livestock farming is one of the biggest drivers of climate change, land use, and also obviously animal suffering. So we're focused on building a scalable solution that delivers the meat that people love without the environmental or ethical cost. 5:33 Alan Jones: Great. Mate, you're not the first to market, although the cultivated meats that are out there on market are obviously, you know, first generation. They've been tremendously expensive to bring to market. And so far they, you know, haven't exactly set the frozen food section of the supermarkets on fire. Where are you in your journey towards bringing this to market? 5:54 Paul Bevan: Yeah, it's a really good point. We'd consider ourself one of the second generation companies within the cultivated meat space using much more advanced technology technology that is scalable. And we also benefit from all the advances within the industry over the last 5 years, you know, whereas companies that were building out facilities 4 or 5 years ago, you know, were forced to use pharmaceutical-grade equipment because that's all that was available, which is obviously really expensive. You know, now there's hundreds of suppliers throughout the industry that has brought costs down around tenfold. So for us, we're currently in the regulatory approval process. So looking to obtain regulatory approval here in Australia from the regulator, which is Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, and also looking to scale up with the two prototype products that we've created so far, which is a pork mince and also a lamb mince as well. 6:51 Alan Jones: Cool. So I think I know that a few other Australian alt-protein startups have lost patience or decided to go and enter into other overseas markets first to try and get regulatory approval. There. Has something changed about the situation here, or are you more determined, or what's going on with the decision to try and seek regulatory approval and go on sale in Australia first? 7:16 Paul Bevan: Yeah, so I'd say that Australia has probably, if not the best, one of the best regulatory framework for novel foods, which is what we are considered. So any food that hasn't been regulated previously is considered a novel food. And the framework here in Australia is actually really transparent. So it's very clear what you need to provide. How long that process is and what it will cost to go through that process. Not only that, the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand's actually updating that process at the moment to make it even faster, even more transparent, and even cheaper as well. And so obviously being based in Australia, it makes, you know, a lot of sense for us to go through that process here in Australia first. Whereas if you look at overseas geographies, particularly if we look at China, for example, it's a lot more opaque in terms of the regulations. Even in the US, timelines, I guess a little bit of political instability and change there makes things very, very difficult to get your timings right. So to find out, you know, how long things are going to take there. So I think we've got a lot of benefits here in Australia as we, you know, focus on Australia and Asia and Asia-Pacific. So it just makes a lot of sense, I think, for us. I don't tell, you know, many of our competitors overseas how good it is here in terms in terms of the regulatory framework, but it is actually a really good place to launch a novel food. 8:40 Alan Jones: All right, great. So I imagine, you know, what little I know of biology, a meat is full of all sorts of little bits and pieces of things. You know, there's little bits of sinew and little bits of fat and yada, yada, yada. There's structures that you can taste with your tongue and your teeth. And so I guess to go from, to focus on mince first makes it simpler to recreate those structures artificially. Is that the reason? 9:06 Paul Bevan: Yeah, 100%. Obviously, a mincemeat product, we produce our cultivated meat and it literally goes through a mincer like you would put traditional meat through a mincer today. And as you mentioned, the structure of that is much simpler to replicate as opposed to a structured product, which would be something like a steak or a fillet or a chop. They'll be second-generation products. Look, we can do it now, other companies can do it now, but to be able to do that at scale is probably still, I'm guessing sort of 5 years away, whereas be able to do a mince product, we can do today. So it just makes sense in terms of that first product. 9:44 Alan Jones: Can you tell me a little bit about the commercial opportunity here? So how much does it cost to grow a kilo of lamb mince the traditional way versus the Magic Valley way? 9:56 Paul Bevan: Yeah, sure. It's actually really interesting because speaking about costs earlier, the perception, I guess, of the industry over the past few years is that it's really expensive to produce, but That's really not the case anymore. The main drivers of cost in terms of, you know, a cultivated meat product are typically what you add to the cells to get them to grow, which is referred to as cell culture media, which is basically a liquid, you know, filled with amino acids, glucose, growth factors, whatever's used to enable the cells to grow, which we typically find, you know, within an animal's body regularly, or anyone's body, to the nutrients that are required to grow. And so the costs for that have come down substantially as well, you know, to— Yeah. 1/600th of what it cost previously. So for us to, yeah, so for us to produce at scale at least, a kilogram of cultivated lamb mince, for example, would cost us around $5 a kilo. And then you've got probably $1, $1.50 in terms of packaging and transport costs, et cetera. So our cost of goods would be around that $6 a kilo mark. At scale. And if we think of traditional lamb mince, particularly our premium mince, the cost of that can range from anywhere between $10 a kilo and $20 a kilo. So being able to not just reach price parity, but to be able to get below current costs for a traditional lamb mince product is certainly doable. And we think, you know, the price of all meat products will continue to actually grow because the demand for those products is going to continue to increase as as population increases, but the supply is going to be very much constrained by the traditional methods of producing meat that we use today. 11:49 Alan Jones: Got it, got it. Thank you. I imagine this is all arising out of university research lab kind of work. Who's behind the technologies that you're using? 12:06 Paul Bevan: Yeah, it's another great question. So we're actually not associated with any university or anything like that. We're a standalone company. We own all of our own IP. And my background, as I mentioned before, I'm not a scientist, I'm not an academic. That's, the food tech is not my background. So I'm on the commercial side of the business and basically built a team of technical experts around me when I founded the business to be able to, you know, develop the technology that we needed to use. And our focus from the start has very much been on two things, and that's being able to mass produce, so being able to scale the technology, and being able to do it at an affordable price point, you know, as we've just mentioned, because, you know, without those two things, it's just another science experiment in the lab. So if people can't afford it and it can't be produced to scale, it's a pointless endeavor. And so we use our induced pluripotent stem cells, is the type of stem cell that we use, which really is the only scalable way to be able to produce cultivated meat. And so basically I went looking for the expert scientists in that area. So Professor Andrew Laslett and Dr. Jacob Goodwin are key technical members. Both of them have previously been at the CSIRO. Andrew actually worked in the manufacturing part of CSIRO, but specialized in induced pluripotent stem cell technology. 13:38 Alan Jones: Mm-hmm. 13:38 Paul Bevan: And Jacob also worked within the similar division at CSIRO, but also spent time at the Karolinska Institute overseas. And also comes from a traditional farming background as well. So has a lot of insights into, you know, current processes and what it's like really for farmers today, you know, on the land, you know, that are faced with, you know, droughts, floods, fires, you know, all of those weather events that impact farming today. 14:06 Alan Jones: So at his front door, he's got a pair of lab Wellington boots and a pair of muddy Wellington boots as well. 14:12 Paul Bevan: Pretty much, yeah, exactly. 14:13 Alan Jones: All right, gotcha. Cool, cool. So tell me about the raise. How much capital are you raising and where are you at in that process? 14:20 Paul Bevan: Yeah, so I mean, it's another interesting question as it comes back to cost because, you know, as I described before, you know, the costs for, you know, some of the larger components, which are bioreactors, which is what we grow the cells in, have come down substantially. So we're currently raising $3 million to build out that first manufacturing facility with up to a 20,000-litre reactor, a couple of smaller reactors as well as part of the seed train. But yeah, so just $3 million to get through the next 12 months, we should see us obtain our regulatory approval and begin being able to commercialise through that manufacturing facility. So it's much, much smaller than I guess people are typically accustomed to hearing because as we know, there's many companies in the space that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and, you know, have spent a lot of that on expensive equipment. Mm-hmm. And haven't been able to be able to produce at scale. 15:14 Alan Jones: Okay, exciting. So maybe there'll be some skepticism around whether it's possible to take to the next stage off that small raise. But on the other hand, there may also be some people think, well, if it's possible, it might be worth exploring. Are there investors already committed to the round? 15:29 Paul Bevan: Yes, we've got a number of investors committed as part of this round. Many of them are mission-aligned in terms of impact investment. We've got a couple of strategic investors from the hospitality sector. And we also got some backing from the Australian government through the Industry Growth Program earlier this year as well. 15:49 Alan Jones: Great. Anybody in the VC space who focuses on deep tech? 15:54 Paul Bevan: Not to this point. That's been, and there've been some interesting conversations in terms of specialist deep tech investors and those conversations are ongoing. So hopefully we'll get one of them over the line shortly. 16:07 Alan Jones: Cool, cool. Fairly small space in Australia. But when you're able to bring one of those on, that ticks a lot of boxes for other investors who look to those funds for validation. Well, if those guys are in, they know what they're doing, you know, are much more likely to join around like that. How do you communicate with all the investors who've expressed some interest but haven't yet climbed on the bandwagon with you? 16:33 Paul Bevan: Yeah, it's an interesting challenge because obviously everyone has a different background and a different interest in, you know, in what we're doing or why they're interested in it. You know, whether, as I mentioned, you know, it's from the impact side, whether they're in the food space, whether they're deep tech, whether they're just interested in the financial return. And so we try to tailor, you know, those conversations individually to those particular investors. But it does present a challenge because, you know, for, you know, the deep tech investors, for example, they're interested in, you know, more of the engineering and where are you at in terms of scale and what are the proof points in terms of the technology? And then you'll speak to an impact investor who's more interested in whether it's reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or how does this impact the environment? And then obviously everyone's interested in the financial return. And so it's a challenging messaging piece for us, not just with investors, but in terms of even as we get closer to market in terms of educating the consumer, educating potential partners and collaborators in the food space as well, who are primarily interested in, you know, consistency of supply and consistency of price. And so it's a great question and it's a really challenging one for us to be able to cover, you know, all of those bases. 17:56 Alan Jones: Well, I've been terrible at investor relations all the way through my career, but I've certainly made a lot of mistakes that I've learned from along the way. And I think, I guess, is how I would recommend going forward is that everybody's interested in all of those things, but some people's primary area of interest is here, but they also want to hear about the rest of it as well. And I think it's important to— you spoke a second ago, you used the word consistently a couple of times, and I think consistency is really key. So getting people into the feeling that this company is moving ahead, whether they're an investor or not, I think is an important part of this process to make people feel like, well, I do have some fear of missing out. I don't have forever to make this decision, to make up my mind. So asking investors who are already committed to be comfortable with you disclosing their, not necessarily their amount of commitment, but the fact that they're on board, that they've signed something even at a high level. If they're comfortable with that, that can be one way to make people feel more comfortable about it. Another thing that you can consider doing is making sure that when you're reaching out to everybody on a regular basis, that So setting aside some time to reach out to each of those individuals one-on-one and say, I know your primary priority is here. So you just got an email from me the other day, you know, with a brief bullet point summary of everything that's happening on all of the fields. But I just wanted to make sure one-to-one that you were aware of, you know, this particular thing that I think you're going to be excited about. So that mix of regular and consistent email update combined with an ongoing program of setting yourself a goal of each week 3 people or each week 2 people or whatever you have the time for to reach out to them directly and say, if I can just get a quick call with you, I'm not going to take more than 10 minutes of your time just to give you a quick update about this particular thing that I know you're waiting to hear from us about. 19:55 Paul Bevan: Thanks. Yeah, that's super, super useful advice. 19:58 Alan Jones: No worries. Paul, thank you very much for coming on Pick My Brain today. I just want to say that if anybody's curious about Magic Valley. They can find Paul Bevan and Magic Valley at magicvalley.com.au. Australia's latest cultivated meat startup coming soon, I hope, to supermarkets shelves near me. I can't wait to make a shepherd's pie with some of this good lamb mince. Mate, thank you for joining me and thank you audience for joining us for every episode of Pick My Brains, the advice podcast for every startup founder. Thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode, never mind the don't forget to like and subscribe nonsense that every podcast host goes on about. Instead, please take a moment to think about someone you know who might benefit from some of the advice we've talked about today and tell them that they should listen to the show. I don't know, maybe they'll like and subscribe. That said, I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, and what you've heard today is, in fact, I'm not a biochemist or a microbiologist either. So nothing's intended as financial, legal, or scientific advice. Please let me know when you think I might be wrong, 'cause I want to get better at this too. Reach out to us on our social channels or via our email addresses. So the Pick My Brain podcast is produced, edited, and beamed directly to your ears by the hardworking and understaffed team Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors. Find out more at dayone.fm. Paul, thank you very much for joining us. Have a great day. Thanks, Al. Thanks for joining me for this and every episode of Pick My Brains, the advice podcast for every startup founder. Have you been listening to the show and wishing you could ask for a little advice about your startup? Well, here's your chance to do just that. We're trying something new and you can be part of it too. Leave me a voicemail message with a question you'd like answered in a future episode, and I'll do my best to give you the best advice I can. Just go to speakpipe.com/pickmybrain and leave me your most pressing question, request, or just some feedback and support for the show. Go to speakpipe.com/pickmybrain or follow the link in the show notes.
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