XA Podcast 017 | Opportunities And Challenges In SE Asian FoodTech W/ Andre Menezes, Fengru Lin And Saurabh Bajaj

Many startups aim to be disruptive and revolutionary, but how many can claim to be changing habits ingrained in us since the dawn of evolution? In this episode, we discuss the opportunities and challenges faced by Foodtech entrepreneurs as they navigate the consumer adoption, regulatory and production challenges of changing the way we eat.

Discussion Topics: Opportunities and Challenges in SE Asian FoodTech w/ Andre Menezes, Fengru Lin and Saurabh Bajaj

• Current and future opportunities for Foodtech
• Encouraging consumer adoption
• Handling regulation
• Managing logistics and barriers to scale
• Potential for Singapore and Hong Kong

Transcript: Opportunities and Challenges in SE Asian FoodTech w/ Andre Menezes, Fengru Lin and Saurabh Bajaj

Belinda Ong: Welcome to another exciting episode of XA Podcast. My name is Belinda and I am the General Manager here at the XA Network. It is a leading technology executives’ investment network in Southeast Asia. Welcome to the first of a two-part series on the FoodTech sector. And today we have the honour and privilege of having three very esteemed founders who are leading the charge and on the frontlines of the alternative protein space to whom actually had exit portfolio companies.

So firstly, we have Fengru Lin, who is the co-founder and CEO of TurtleTree. TurtleTree is a Singapore headquartered company that is the world’s first company to use cell-based methods to make lab-grown milk. And then we have Andre Menezes, who is the co-founder and COO of Next Gen. Next Gen is a Singapore-based company that produces plant-based chicken. And their first product TiNDLE is an alternative to chicken and it’s currently served in restaurants across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau, you can actually order it today. And then we also have Saurabh Bajaj, who is the CEO of Eat Just, the Asian subsidiary of Eat Just, and last year, Singapore was the first country to approve Eat Just cultured chicken nuggets for sale under the good meat brand. Eat Just also just announced the 100 million dollar agreement with Proterra Asia to build its largest-ever egg alternative production facility in Singapore.

So lots of exciting things are happening in the alternative protein space here. And without further ado, I’d like to hand it off to maybe I’ll start with Fengru Lin and Andre, then Saurabh Bajaj, with the first question and introduction. The attendees here today would love to hear more about your story. So what sparked your interest in the alternative protein space? And how do you get to where you are today?

Fengru Lin: Thank you, Belinda. So a bit about my background. My background was actually in the tech space, obviously working for Google as well as Salesforce. And when I was working for Google, about four years ago, I was learning how to make cheese as a hobby. As you can imagine in the whole cheese-making process, I needed to access raw fresh milk, and in Singapore, there were hardly any cows, I had to go around the region to look for sources of raw fresh milk. I was in Indonesia & Thailand. And some of the farms that I went to had challenges around contract farming, and antibiotics and hormones that are being pumped into the cows. And as a result, the milk quality is not as good. And I know good milk.

I was in Vermont for a few months to learn how to make cheese and the milk quality it doesn’t perform as that of Vermont. So back then I was still working for Google and that was when I met my co-founder Max. He was at our office and on stage sharing about different technologies. Some of the technologies that he talked about were companies like Memphis and Bluenalu four years ago, these companies were one of the pioneers to make meat and seafood from cells without having to go to the animal. So we started to explore using similar methods to make milk. And back then nobody else was doing it.

There are some companies making single proteins. But milk is such a complex product, there are 2000 different ingredients in milk. So we knew that we needed to access the full composition of milk, which is why we decided to adopt the cell-based method. We pull in our scientists, we started the team and in 2019, we made some breakthroughs that was when we found our patterns and fast forward to today now we have about 33 employees with a large presence in Singapore, as well as Davis, California.

Belinda Ong: Excellent. Thank you, Fengru. Andre.

Andre Menezes: Well, first of all, thank you, Belinda, for being here. Great, I’m having a chance to chat with you and share a little bit more about our story here. As for myself, quite a nonlinear kind of background. I started with investment. I mean, I’m an engineer. I studied Investment Funds. Throughout my career went from an investment fund to one of the portfolio companies which was the largest poultry exporter in the world. And throughout that journey, I learned a few things in the meat industry that were against what we were learning in the investment thesis like we thought it would be a great business forever due to the increased consumption of protein around the world.

But we were not considering a few factors that also inside the meat industry I started to see and became very sensitive about and the sensitivity came from the inefficiency angle it’s a highly inefficient way of producing food to basically feed animals, transport animals around, carry all that livestock for so long and then slaughter handle, it’s not made to be food, the animals are not programmed to be simply food that we transport industrialised. And that inefficiency has struck me.

So after that stint in Brazil with a very upstream kind of thing I came to Singapore and as I was to conduct a joint venture here in Singapore, doing food distribution from the same company, I was in Brazil, but as a joint venture. And in that journey, on top of learning, again, from different perspectives on the issues of meat businesses, I also had a chance to get in contact with the sector plant base. I started distributing Impossible Foods here in Singapore back in the early 19. And that was striking to me how that product performed, how consumers were receptive, how everything was changing from what used to be the past in terms of veggie meat alternatives, that’s definitely not the case.

As a meat lover, I wouldn’t ever give up my burger if that wouldn’t perform and I was convinced that that performs and so I did, became highly passionate about it and I was so lucky because in parallel, there was a guy in Germany, Timo who was building his business, from scratch from 2012 until 2020 in this space in plant-based, very pioneer I mean, I got in contact with this already, like in 2018, 19 but he was actually one of the real pioneers during from 2012, all the way to 2020 building up a profitable company with over 20 million euros revenue exporting to more than 10 countries with 15,000 points of sales, like me in Germany.

So in parallel with all of my learnings and all of his learnings, we were both exiting our paths, he was selling the company, I was quitting my job to start something new in this space and we both happen to be here in Singapore. So that’s how Next Gen started. From there, obviously, we put together everything we’ve learned throughout our lives in terms of the companies we work with, from the meat sector, global corporations, distribution angle, production, technology itself, everything has done previously there, including our CTO who is used to work with Timo. We put all of that together and create Next Gen with the best business model we could dream of basically bringing together all the best practices that we’ve learned across.

Started this journey in April last year, developed product brand capacity, team, and everything throughout 2020, all the fundamentals in place raised a seed round last year, which was closed earlier this year, launched in Singapore in March, and then less than three months after it we’re actually launching Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur in Macau. Kuala Lumpur is delayed due to the COVID. But the progress has been pretty solid and the reception has been awesome. So this is the short version of the last 10 years.

Belinda Ong: Wow, that’s quite a journey, lots of nonlinear progression, as you can see many different parts. Saurabh.

Saurabh Bajaj: Sure. Thanks, everyone for dialing in, and for taking the time out. So just as a company started about 10 years back, we feel that if you look at the global food systems today, whether we like it or not, in some form or other, they are broken, and they need to be fixed. I say they are broken because if it was not for the broken food system and the wet markets, we would have not seen the outbreak of the zoonotic diseases that we saw, including COVID-19 or SARS MERS before that.

Each time that similar outbreak happens, we decided that we would change ourselves. But unfortunately, until each one of us all 7 billion people on this planet change, things aren’t going to really change. And that’s what Just Eat is trying to do in its own small little ways. We currently have two key products. One is the plant-based egg, and the second is cultured meat. In fact, we are the only company in the world to have received regulatory approval for the sale of cultured meats currently. In terms of Just Asia, Just Asia was born about one year back.

We felt that as an organisation, we need to focus more on Asia, over two-thirds of the global population resides in Asia, Asia is predominantly dependent on imported food, and it has not grown enough food to feed its own people. And we felt given all of those nuances at play, and the bigger objective of trying to fix the broken food systems, it would make sense to increase our focus on Asia, and with that as an objective we set up Just Asia.

Belinda Ong: Excellent. So on that piece, now that we’ve all had a high-level overview, let’s get into the meat of the session, starting with the consumer acceptance piece. So I have a big question for all three of you, what is driving consumer demand today, and you know, the golden market for alternative protein is continuing to grow?

Fengru Lin: Maybe I can start first, I think, as we can all see, I mean, I’m here in the US at the moment. Last week was one of the hottest weekends ever for Seattle. Global warming is real. And as the world is starting to be increasingly aware of the impacts of dietary choices on people’s health, as well as the environment, everyone is a lot more concerned about health conditions, the environmental conditions, and they are seeking alternative proteins, especially the younger folks, as the younger folks graduate from school, a lot of the curriculum is also about ESG. So really, these are the ones driving all these changes.

Saurabh Bajaj: I would tend to concur with that. I think it’s the younger population that is at the forefront of driving this change. They’re the ones who want to experiment, who are more open to new ideas to new concepts of food. And in terms of what you earlier referred to about demand clearly, there’s an increase in demand. One is because there is this increasing awareness about the health benefits. Also, there is increasing awareness about planet welfare, and animal welfare. And then as we all know, as the economy grows, as the population grows, the growth for demand is expected to grow as propensity to spend increases, since people end up spending more on proteins and more on eating.

Andre Menezes: I mean; those points are definitely exactly what we see as well. But what I would like to add to that is that we see like, what’s happening right now is probably a transition and that’s the transition that’s very clear and you see different generations becoming more environmentally aware, and seeking proactively to reduce carbon footprint, to reduce the intake of food, or the activities that generate more emission of greenhouse gases, or all other environmental aspects.

So this is one of the trends that’s happening right now as Fengru said and as I just confirmed, but the way we see is that this is phase one, there is a phase two, which I think is going to be transformational, which is the opposite of what we all have been leaving for the last decades. If you recall, meat and dairy, are synonymous with affluence, when the countries are getting richer, when the families are growing from lower to middle class and above, what happens is that you increase the amount of protein that you’re consuming rather than carbs, and that is highly linked back to meat into there.

So animal farming products, and then there is this aspirational level that’s there and there is as well, an acquired taste kind of thing. So it’s so aspirational that whether we like it or not, it doesn’t matter, our parents think we are kids will always be teaching us that this is important, it’s very healthy, it’s the right thing to do and they’re very glad to put it on our table.

What’s happening right now that we see as a major shift for the last decades is that this generation that’s now questioning all of that and being open to change, will eventually have another generation right behind the kids and their babies and they will not teach their kids that you have to have meat or you have to have milk that is coming from animals, because they will be already open and use to two different and more efficient ways of producing what we really like, which is the food using a technology that’s much better than the one we were used to, which is animal farming.

I guess this is probably where we see that the huge shift from early adopters and innovators to mass consumption will really happen and this is a massive movement that will happen across in order the last decades.

Belinda Ong: On points, and I think that it really resonates. But we’ve been talking about alternative proteins as a homogeneous market and we know that isn’t true, right? Most of us have ties to the Asia Pacific region, which is known as one of the biggest markets for plant-based foods. So what is zooming in on this region and what does the trend mean for the different markets across Asia? And if you can even speak specifically for Southeast Asia that will be great.

Andre Menezes: Well, maybe I can start with that. It’s interesting to separate two moments in history here in the Asia Pacific because everyone would say that this is the region Asia Pacific, where you have the highest amount of consumption and the biggest number of vegetarians and the highest amount of plant-based proteins volume consumption when you take into account, tofu and tempeh and all that, and that’s absolutely true, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But this is not the group that’s actually driving the consumption of the new, let’s call it the new generation of what is it that we’re seeing basically post-2010. The drivers that were driving that all the way, would be different from the ones that are driving this now and expectations are equally different. So back in time, be it because of religion, be it because of vegetarian reasons, be it because of whatever reason, or access even financial access the reality is that those products were not meant to perform for people who were meat eaters and that’s the past.

What’s happening right now is that we’re starting to see and this is where, when people say that Asia is behind the rise, this is what really means for this new generation, the consumption or the volume in the region here is still smaller than the rest and it’s starting to move. So what we see in the Asia Pacific from our experience, and obviously, we just start as a company, but we can bring a big bag from my past experiences and from what we’re seeing as we develop those markets, is that you have Hong Kong, Singapore, driving ahead of everyone else, in levels that are comparable to the London’s and the New York’s and San Francisco’s of the world, a little bit more, a little bit less, but you already have a culinary scene that is open to you, you have consumers that are aware, you have information widely available, you have high levels of education, and this you have Singapore in Hong Kong, then you have China gaining some traction clearly, but still in China scale is still very small.

And then you have the rest of Southeast Asia, which is still extremely incipient products that are simply mostly not available. And this is probably what Singapore was maybe four years ago. That’s the reading we have at the moment. The drivers, however, that are driving consumers to adopt are the same, what we’ve seen is that consumers adopting this new category, are 18 to 35 years old, mostly they’re well educated, they’re global, they’re super connected and digital. And they are more similar between Singapore, KL Hong Kong, and San Francisco than they are between KL and Sarawak. So it’s a very global consumer from that sense, this is what we’re seeing here from our perspective.

Fengru Lin: Yep, I agree to a very large extent and maybe I can extend the discussion from just plant base to other parts of alternative proteins. So from where technology comes from, we are producing cell base milk and enabling cell-based meat companies. So when we’re talking about cell-based, I wouldn’t call it vegan or plant-based because these are still the same animal cells and have the same bio profile as animal milk. So these are the same nutritional values and profile of the actual food product.

So when we’re talking about what we’re focused on, our only products would really be focused on the high-value ingredients found in milk. One of our first products to market would be lactoferrin, which is a very expensive and very valuable protein found in both human and cow milk. Lactoferrin today is a very expensive ingredient that is traded at $2,000 a kg and you compare that with whey which is 80 cents a kg. So we really want to target some high-value ingredients. And our go-to-market for these ingredients would be performance drinks, as well as infant nutrition. So introducing these novel ways of producing traditional ingredients would mean that we are still playing in the field where the price point is very important.

But because we’re targeted at high-value products, the markets that have a better acceptance for these high-value products, like what Andre said, would still be places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and much more like the US in California and New York. So this is obviously quite different from other parts of Asia. But we also need to look at different ways of positioning the same products or similar products in different parts of these different countries in Asia.

Saurabh Bajaj: Yeah, broadly aligned with what Andre and Fengru said, Andre in particular, we see a lot of demand coming out of Asia. And also Asia is so wide and large, that there are so many pockets of influence where people want to grab this, there are so many people who would like to experiment with food in Asia that it’s a phenomenon demand that we see. China is not really one single country. It’s like 50 countries put into one.

Same as the case perhaps with India with Indonesia, we see a lot of demand and a lot of inbound inquiries happening from each of those markets, people chasing us people sending us emails all the time saying that, hey, we want to try your products, when would they be launched in my supermarket or in my area where I live. So we are seeing a lot of demand in Asia as well. And of course, the Western world is perhaps slightly ahead in terms of the demand currently, but we see that evolving very soon.

Belinda Ong: Understand and I like to build on what Fengru mentioned, very interesting how the hotel industry has focused on a particular type of protein and how that has impacted their go to market strategy. I noticed that Next Gen is primarily sold through restaurants whereas, for just products that she sold to both supermarkets and restaurants, you sell both eggs as well as chickens, can you just take us through why you decided on those different go-to-market strategies, and how this has affected your consumer acceptance campaigns.

Saurabh Bajaj: Sure maybe I go first, and I would talk from my perspective, and of course, Andre could share his view. For us, when we launch our products into a market, we feel that launching it through a restaurant gives you a great controlled experience. So you initially would start off that way. And once you have created enough traction going for you you have good sales velocity, you try to also get into the supermarkets into the retail channels for the home consumer to buy the product.

So I would say that for many companies when we look at them, we see that typically they would try and initially start off from restaurants and preferably, either high-end or super specialty or focused on something so as to differentiate themselves to create consumer interest going for them. Once the objective is achieved, then they try to move into multiple restaurants, and they try to broaden their base themselves. For us, that has typically been the approach in most markets.

Andre Menezes: Since he started, I think I’ve followed because Fengru is a very different and amazing business model. So let her share about it. But yeah, it is not that we are a company selling only two restaurants. We are a company that as Saurabh said, we are a company that we start our go-to-market with restaurants and a few elements and he said exactly like couldn’t agree more.

But I guess what we see is that there is a perception created by the historical products that were available in the past, that plant-based foods are unnecessarily attributed or connected to compromises and compromising in taste, compromising in experience compromises in all that. And it’s also known that great restaurants would never get a bad ingredient too large.

So what we see is that we have a massive mission to accomplish, which is to convince consumers that the products that we’re bringing into the market, the new category that’s emerging right now and that’s not true for everyone, of course, but there are players that are very decent at that. And there are players that are not. But those products can operate at the highest level, those products can convince Michelin star chefs that they can create dishes out of it. And not simply that mock meat experience in all the cheap stuff they used to be around selling to because of vegetarians due to whatever dietary restrictions they had. And that’s simply because we need to convince people that are meat eaters into translating into a more flexible diet.

No, we’re not telling everyone or we don’t ever tell anyone that they should be vegan or vegetarian. Each one has the right to choose their own diet. But what we see as our job in the industry is to provide design technology and products and ultimately experience that we will basically make it so easy for consumers to have a great experience without animal farming that they will just ask themselves why have they ever eaten animal rights? And that’s our goal. If you want to make a parallel, the way we say the way we play is that I’m sure that not a lot of activism, or not a lot of criticism was really needed or preachy.

People really needed to convince urban habitants to swift from horses to cars as a means of transport. And that’s how we see our job in an industry it’s we should bring technologies that simply make sure that experiences are at that level and connect to the go-to-market strategy. This is where we have an experience. It’s not that we can make a delicious nugget.

In fact, I just came back from our kitchen we’re having some prototypes, and they’re absolutely fantastic better than chicken nuggets, really but how cool is the experience of even chicken nugget watching Netflix with our respective people Netflix in the network here, but it’s not the same as having that experience in a nice restaurant with your friends and families, and this is how important is for us to drive that education. That’s why we start with restaurants. But we definitely move to a broader market as well.

Fengru Lin: And for us, I think our go-to market strategy is very B2B focused. That’s how we believe our technology can reach scale. So when we talk about the milk ingredients, for example, there are certain brands that we want to be able to sell to the big dairy companies, the big CPG companies, because they have the local knowledge of local preferences. So to give you guys fun examples, even in the infant nutrition space, we will think well, babies would probably not know about the taste, they will just drink whatever, right.

But actually, there are a lot of local flavours that are being thought through for local markets in the infant nutrition space, because mothers would tend to taste the milk before they feed their babies so there are certain nuances. For example, infant nutrition in India would be a lot sweeter than infant nutrition in Singapore, because of the parents or preferences there. So all of these little nuances, we want to be able to work with the partners, who have long decades of experience working with regulators, working with consumers to bring products to market, because they know their consumers best.

Belinda Ong: Makes a ton of sense. Actually, now that framework has talked about regulations it’s built on that, you know that let’s be frank, you know, tech advances around food consumers have been pretty cautious around them, you know, case in point GMO labeling, what do you see as the biggest challenges around governance and regulations outside of proteins. And in your opinion, what needs to change from a regulation perspective?

Fengru Lin: Maybe I can start first, I think in Singapore first of all, we are very fortunate and the government is very progressive when it comes to regulating novel foods just because Singapore has this food security challenge. In fact, SFA A star and NTU, put together a coalition they call it fresh. And this fresh program works with normal food companies like ours, like a consulting arm, to define what their regulatory pathway will look like, and work with SFA on regulating that.

No other country abroad has that. So we are very fortunate here. And in fact, a recent ISO standard that came out this year is an APEC ISO standard. Singapore is the first one to adopt it, it would deem some of the ingredients that we’re producing as being natural ingredients, as long as we can prove bio similarity to what occurs in nature. So it doesn’t need to be a GMO label. And in the US, rules are quite similar as well.

As long as there’s no foreign DNA in that end product of our process, which is the case, you can call your product pretty fast and easily to pass your grass approvals, as well as you don’t have to call your product, the GMO product, of course, in Europe it is a little bit more strict, as long as the whole process there is any genetically modified processes involve the regulators would be a bit more picky on that area.

But I think by and large, everyone is just really trying to identify where the safety concerns can be, and working with industry to provide these alternative solutions for the markets.

Saurabh Bajaj: I think from an Asian perspective, it would be good if we could have some kind of a centralised regulatory approval body while we see Singapore be at the forefront of some of this work however, if SFA gives out approval, yet, it’s not that everyone else in the region would accept that. Each country has its own unique ways of looking at it and that sometimes causes delays or slows down the rollout of new innovative food products. So from a regulatory perspective, if there could be larger trade bodies coming together or something along those lines I think that would be something really helpful.

Andre Menezes: Yeah, for us it is a very different scenario, though I mean, needless to say, we’re big fans of what the guys are doing in the biotech space. I mean, starting with my own experience with Impossible Foods in the past, it’s a great company, with their heme and everything. So we really respect everyone developing a lot in biotech. They can actually change the world together with all the technologies that are being developed.

But for Next Gen, we decided to take a strategic route in which you are pure food tech, we do not go beyond anything that requires new regulatory approval. It’s a strategic decision. It’s simply because we have an approach in which we want to scale very fast and capture an early nascent market. And for that, we have decided that it’s more favourable not to have any regulatory restrictions, since it’s very hard to rely on government approval to be able to commercialise your products. So again, huge value in whoever’s doing that, and many companies doing it.

I think we have two here and Impossible Foods as well. In our case, we just took a different route, which is less breakthrough in terms of technology, if you will, it’s food technology that has been around for longer brought to an application that is already widely available and scalable, in the present, that risk can scale global, therefore, we don’t use any GMO ingredients. And we can simply sell it pretty much everywhere, which is in line with our strategy as a company. So for us, that regulatory is not an issue at all.

Belinda Ong: Very interesting all the different approaches. Actually, I would love to dive a little bit deeper into that, Andre. So apart from regulatory challenges, it also could be technical ones. Can you just walk us through if there were any constraints hosted by the local supply chain and how did that affect perhaps the cost and consistency of manufacturing?

Andre Menezes: Very good question for sure. And again, when we design the business model, we opted for a model in which that wouldn’t affect us as a company. First we are asset-light, and we do not do manufacturing, we do not do distribution where those issues would surface. And we have ways of mitigating the issues even for those who are specialised. But what that means is that we can engage really specialists and each one of them so very similar to what Fengru was saying, they are specialists in different areas.

In her case, she was mentioning the milk producers, and they know the market, they know the regulations, they know the operations, and they understand all that. We have a very similar approach towards that specific front in which we engage with local distributors, we engage with manufacturers that are pure-play manufacturers and what that means is that that challenge is taken care of by our partners, and today, our factories in the Netherlands operating at the highest possible quality standards with a huge capacity and they have all the international certificates, they serve the McDonald’s of the world and subways McDonald’s of the world.

And we work with local distributors that are very used to handling cold chain, and supply chain and that’s how we mitigate that challenge. Therefore, we were not impacted by any specific challenges related to supply chain, or cold chain in local markets, which if we had a more localised smaller footprint localised strategy we would definitely face.

Belinda Ong: Fengru, Saurabh.

Saurabh Bajaj: Maybe Fengru could go first.

Fengru Lin: So for us, I think ours is a little bit special case again, if you look at the cell-based meat or the fermentation, they call it we are converting energy to food. So in the production of these novel ingredients, a lot of power and energy actually goes into production, it makes up about 40 to 50% of energy, and 40% to 50% of the cost of goods sold goes into utilities to power. So for us, we need to go where power is the cheapest combined with a matrix of where the raw materials will be whether it’s easy access to talent.

So we are putting together different decision points and weighing them to see where the production can be done. So I’ll give you an example of the massive differences. So we were in Mexico City, some of the contract manufacturers there. I mean, labor is quite cheap there. But if you’re talking about power, it is 30 cents per kilowatt hour and you compare that with the US which is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour. In The UAE we could be able to get some grants and some subsidies is 1.2 cents per kilowatt hour. So right off the gate, you get a lot of competitive advantages if you’re able to access manufacturing plants or a site over there.

Saurabh Bajaj: So for us, I think we would break it into two parts, when we analyse it, the reason being that we are present in both the plant-based meat which Andre is talking about, or plant-based alternative protein as well as the cultured side, which Fengru is referring to. On the plant-based side, what is critical for us is the logistics cost.

So, it makes sense to be close to the source. However, sometimes the sources could be spread out over multiple countries, then perhaps to a country that has a location which permits you to bring in the raw material from various sources. so as to minimise the logistics cost. The labor cost isn’t really intense, given that these are highly automated plants, which we’re trying to build. So, those are two starting points and then, of course, also where the final consumption market is. So before we decided to set up our plant in Singapore, we did a detailed cost analysis, doing a comparison amongst four countries, one of which was Singapore, and three others.

It was a pure commercial decision that we took by hiring outside third party advisors for this work. And we felt that Singapore ranks right up there, in terms of respect for IP, in terms of access to skilled labor, and also it gives you access to capital. There were other things that were being done in terms of an enabling environment that was being created in Singapore. So all of that tilted up a decision in favour of Singapore for the plant-based alternative products. For the cultured ones, we feel again, Singapore is at the forefront because Singapore is the only country that has given the approval. We are currently doing a small scale. We have a small-scale facility that we are running in Singapore, which is along with Singapore Polytechnic. But yeah, there are a host of other considerations before we decide to expand further.

Our Guest: Andre Menezes

In this episode, we have Andre Menezes (Co-founder and COO of TiNDLE), Fengru Lin (Co-Founder and CEO of Turtletree Labs), and Saurabh Bajaj (former CEO* of Just Asia), who discuss the nuances of this new-age business. They are interviewed by Belinda Ong, General Manager of the XA Network. Saurabh was the CEO of Just Asia at the time of the recording in Jun 2021.