Imagine leaping from student life directly into your own food manufacturing startup serving a high growth consumer market. Britteny Bryan and Nick Harlow, who met at the University of Canterbury, did exactly that. Having converted to veganism, the young couple spotted a gap in the market for tasty, pre-cooked vegan meals. A few years on, they are now busy juggling the many demands of their exciting and rapidly developing business Berkano Foods.

Pre-seed funding from a distribution partner plus a chunk of cash in hand from a crowd funding campaign facilitated initial scaling of the Berkano operation, allowing the company to move into a MPI certified food production facility in the suburb of Belfast, Christchurch. With retail distribution plus direct sales of vegan meals through the Berkano website, the company now enjoys multi-million dollar revenues with six full time employees on board. But like many entrepreneurs, the couple went through some tough times at the beginning of the venture.

The original setup in another part of the city featured an attached vegan cafe. The cafe helped to grow their fan base, but the emergence of pandemic lockdowns in 2020 soon put a stop to the flow of coffee and vegan snacks. The upside was that demand for pre-cooked vegan meals went through the roof. Berkano also caught the attention of FoodStuffs who agreed that tasty, microwaveable vegan food was a fast growing category worthy of shelf space. The product can now be found in New World supermarket food chillers all over the South Island. Progressive Enterprises quickly followed suit by adding distribution across Countdown and Fresh Choice stores.

Dedicated to sustainability and with a slew of awards under their belts, including a notable mention in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, the founders have taken responsibility for embedding positive environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles into the business. Product packaging is completely recyclable and the Berkano team are fully transparent about their manufacturing and quality control processes. You can actually take a peek inside their meat free production line through the Berkano Tik Tok video series.

Markets for plant-based food products are expected to enjoy double-digit growth over the next 5 years, as consumer dietary preferences continue to migrate away from traditional sources of protein. This should support a planned future investment round. From meat free mango chicken to humble mac ‘n cheese, Berkano looks well positioned to become a leading light in Canterbury’s food manufacturing sector.

ThincLab Canterbury provides business advisory to emerging food companies as part of the ThincLab-FoodSouth pilot programme with the support of ChristchurchNZ.

Over a decade ago MacDiarmid Institute founder, renown physicist and technology entrepreneur the late Professor Sir Paul Callaghan proclaimed that we needed to make New Zealand “the place where talent wants to live”. Results of the 2022 Food, Fibre & Agritech (FFA) Supernode Challenge suggest we have reasons to be optimistic about attracting top talent to our shores.

During the last few weeks ThincLab advisors have been mentoring teams involved in the 2022 Food, Fibre and Agritech Supernode Challenge accelerator programme. The Challenge, supported by ChristchurchNZ, KiwiNet and the Canterbury Mayoral Forum sought to uncover innovative ideas with commercalisation potential from across research and business. Notably, environmental sustainability has been a key theme addressed by entrants within this year’s programme. Applicants really stepped up, with an initial 36 respondents whittled down to 24 participants, of these 12 outstanding finalists were selected.

Canterbury has a long and rich association with agricultural and is home to two universities and numerous land based research institutions. So there is no shortage of smart ideas on offer. But it has been a special thrill to see our skilled migrant researchers and entrepreneurs strongly represented among the participants in this programme. For many of them it has been a steep learning curve stepping out of the research lab and grappling with the fundamentals of business for the first time. But in every case they have grasped the opportunity and run with it.

Challenge overall winners Mahnaz Shaverdi and Associate Professor Ken Morison are food process engineering researchers from the University of Canterbury with big plans for turning plain old pea protein into a more desirable food source. Shaverdi migrated from Iran with the aim of pursuing further study and raising her young family in New Zealand. Morison is a respected engineer who originally returned home to work in the dairy industry after completing his doctorate at Imperial College in London. Commercialisation of their research is timely. Plant-based ingredients are one of the fastest growing food categories globally, as witnessed through the recent investment by Khosla Ventures in Canterbury plant protein processor Leaft Foods.

At a time when the world needs many bright minds to be working collectively on solving the myriad of social, economic and environmental problems that confront us, it is exciting to know that our skilled migrants are making an increasingly significant contribution. This is a success story that we rarely hear about and that needs to be told more often. Sir Paul Callaghan would have been encouraged by this progress.

As a child, Andy Park says he was always interested in drawing, building and breaking things apart. It is hardly surprising then that he eventually discovered the answers to many of his questions through the world of science. Lately he’s been applying his ever-curious mind to decarbonisation of the construction industry.

SeaBoard is a fire-resistant plasterboard lining material made from processed seaweed. The product solves several “burning” problems right now with builders desperate to find additional sources of safe, clean and fireproof construction materials. SeaBoard not only has a much lower carbon footprint during production than traditional board, but actually sequesters carbon in the form of compressed seaweed.

Development of the product evolved out of Park’s University of Canterbury studies. Now as part of the Food, Fibre and Agritech Supernode Accelerator, Andy has received valuable advice on how to take the venture forward, including support from ThincLab Canterbury advisor Sean Whitaker. The programme has lifted his confidence and improved his overall knowledge on the business side, says Andy. Although it seems like the young University of Canterbury (UC) grad was on the right track from an early age.

Park emigrated from Korea with his family when he was a teenager. He cites his businessman father as a key influence leading him along the path of technology entrepreneurship. But he also credits Jony Ive, Apple’s lead consumer products designer as an inspiration. “Apple demonstrated that good product design can fundamentally improve our lives”, enthuses Andy. With the right partnerships in place, Seaboard could become a revolutionary and much sought after building product.

Things really took off with his 2021 success at the UC Innovation Jumpstart competition, just as he was completing his Industrial Product Design Bachelor degree. The School of Product Design sits within the highly regarded College of Engineering at the University of Canterbury. Andy was able to further his project over summer through a research assistant position with Dr. Dennis Pau looking into the thermal properties of different seaweed species.

The project is one of several submitted to the Challenge by UC researchers looking into sustainability and the transition to a greener, lower carbon economy. Now plans are underway to develop a final prototype and explore licensing options. Things are just warming up for Andy Park and his seaweed centred product design.

The Food, Fibre & Agritech Supernode Challenge is made possible with the support of ChristchurchNZ, KiwiNet and the Canterbury Mayoral Forum.

Carbon credit trading has sometimes been criticised as counterproductive to the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions on the basis that markets enable large emitters to avoid any meaningful change of behaviour. However trading markets, technologies and legislative frameworks are evolving steadily to answer such questions. Carbon trading and offsetting remain an important part of the mix. This year three of our Food, Fibre & Agritech accelerator teams are working hard on projects to increase transparency and impact around carbon sequestration within indigenous forest.

Current evidence suggests that more than two thirds of New Zealand’s native forest has been lost since human settlement began. This pattern is certainly not unique to our remote islands. Tropical and temperate rain forest ecosystems continue to remain under threat around the world. But now loopholes in local legislation are disturbingly allowing further environmental degradation through extensive plantings of low value pine tree monocultures. So at a time when we need to be remediating our environment and permanently removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to limit increases in temperature, many people feel frustrated at a lack of appropriate solutions.

Switching to renewable energy sources, making fewer car journeys and consuming less imported goods for example are practical steps that everyone can take right now. But the wider global economy is undergoing a significant transition away from carbon intensive activity as green investment grows and polluting industries fall out of favour with investors. Carbon sequestration in the form of native tree reforestation is an exciting approach that could not only help us meet emission targets, but also regenerate long lost natural ecosystems alongside benefiting fresh water through reduced sediment loss.

Fittingly, the support of economic development agency ChristchurchNZ is allowing us to take an ecosystem building approach to our startup innovation community too! So as part of the Food, Fibre & Agritech Supernode Challenge we curated a collaborative discussion session (pictured) with participant teams working on carbon transition problems. Primary Insight co-founder and environmental consultant Andrew Curtis is a man who prefers to describe big problems as opportunities. As a precursor to carbon trading, the company wants to extract and process remote sensing data that validates land afforestation and creates value for rural landowners, he explained.

CarbonZ is building a New Zealand flavoured carbon credit trading platform that will immediately create liquidity for native forest owners within the local framework. Company co-founder and University of Canterbury Honours graduate Finn Ross secured pre-seed funding for the venture from some well known local investors and has an eye on future growth into global markets. The Plant My Carbon crew are looking into electronic tagging of native tree plantations to allow users to visualise exactly where their investments and carbon offsets reside. The team formed through working on MBA projects within the University of Canterbury Business School. Taking an ecosystem approach to growing our startups is all about  bringing together capital, talent and good ideas for a greener future.

#FFA2022 is supported by ChristchurchNZ, KiwiNet and the Canterbury Mayoral Forum alongside ThincLab Canterbury, University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship and B.linc as delivery partners.

Climate change and environmental concerns are never far from our minds these days and especially so for science researchers within our universities and Crown Research Institutes. So this year’s Food, Fibre and Agritech Supernode Challenge has a special focus on primary sector sustainability. As global interest in waste mitigation and production of alternative foods with lower carbon profiles surges, University of Canterbury researchers are rising to the challenge.

Reducing emissions through application of greentech is not only good for the planet, but also represents a substantial economic opportunity. Something the global investment community is rapidly getting on board with. It is estimated that over $100 billion was invested in cleantech or decarbonisation technologies by private equity or venture capital investors in 2021 globally and more than half of that was for early stage companies. Those figures do not include hundreds of millions that have poured into plant-based food companies as consumer demand explodes.

The recent news of a US$15M series A investment into Leaft Foods, from highly respected deep tech investor Khosla Ventures, illustrates that research based Canterbury companies can foot it on the global stage. Founded by agri-food pioneers Maury and John Penno, the company aims to produce high value Rubisco protein directly from leafy crops with a 10x lower carbon footprint per hectare than conventional dairy protein. Food process engineer and Leaft CEO Ross Milne learned his trade under the tutelage of Associate Professor Ken Morison at the University of Canterbury.

In fact Morison and PhD candidate Mahnaz Shaverdi form one of the researcher teams involved in this year’s Food, Fibre & Agritech Supernode Accelerator programme (FFA). They are looking into how production technologies from the dairy industry can be applied to processing of plant protein. University of Canterbury biotechnologist Associate Professor David Leung is excited about the application of specialised plant varieties in solving environmental problems. With post-doctoral research associate Dr Gowtham Janardhanan, the team are focused on the vexatious issue of extracting nitrates from waterways with plant biomass that can be recycled as an energy feedstock.

Finalists in the programme will present at E Tipu – BOMA Agri Summit in Christchurch 21-22 June.

Food, fibre and agritech contributes a huge share of Canterbury’s regional economic activity. Connecting researcher talent to local industry as well as identifying sources of capital for good ideas are all part of the grand plan to build capability. #FFA2022 is supported by ChristchurchNZ, KiwiNet and the Canterbury Mayoral Forum alongside ThincLab Canterbury, University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship and B.linc as delivery partners.

Image credit: Paul Spence