Felix Collins: 20 Million Black Soldier Fly Farming, Food Waste Insights & Low Carbon Future - E576

"There are two pathways, right? You can go the traditional route: go to big companies that hold your hand, provide funding, and help you build up big plants that get you to economies of scale or you can try and do it yourself. And when you try and do it yourself, and you've got your back against the wall, you come up with creative ideas like doing the feed mill's job for them, at least for now, so you can access the market faster. And for us, the most important thing was accessing the market. We're a deep tech company that's been forced to monetize early. There's still so much about our technology to develop, but we, I mean, have new traction and repeat customers that tell you things that you can never learn in the lab. There aren't enough people taking risks of going to market with basically MVP stuff that you get taught in business school: go to market, stay lean, iterate. But it's really hard to do in biotech; it's hard to do in novel protein. But I think it's possible, and more founders should be trying it." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech

"And I was left during COVID, 9 months in a condo, didn't know anyone here, didn't really speak the language, so it was just me and a computer. And I used that time to basically hypothesize a way to get other species into the system to do what black soldier flies do, but with fungi, with bacteria, and with loads and loads and loads of them. I had an ecosystem on paper. It made sense. So I raised a small amount of cash to try it out, and after the first year, instead of producing 3 kilos of protein for every 100 kilos of input, we were getting 20 kilos of protein. That immediately showed us that we had a way to make novel protein affordable just by increasing efficiencies." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech

"The way I think about agritech is it's like an incredibly cheap Tesla or electric car. Think of how much money it takes to buy an electric car and look at the decarbonization impact of that. Agritech has the potential to create the impact of one electric car with one 1000th of the spend. I think that Southeast Asia specifically has the edge over Europe, it has the edge over America when it comes to implementing this technology. And because of that, I think Southeast Asia is going to be the center for the next industrial revolution in food." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech

Felix Collins, founder of Full Circle Biotech, speaks with Jeremy Au about how biology, not machines, is transforming the future of food. Felix shares how his company turns agricultural waste into affordable, high-quality protein using insects, fungi, and bacteria. They unpack why SEA farmers care more about savings than slogans, how superstition meets pragmatism on shrimp farms, and how skipping big feed mills unlocked faster scale. Felix also opens up about building alone in a basement with buckets of waste, and why cost, not carbon credits, is the real key to decarbonizing food systems. It's a candid look at resilience, innovation, and why Southeast Asia may lead the next global food revolution.

02:22 Insect Farming as a Protein Solution: Early efforts to teach contract farmers in Kenya failed; he shifted to centralized operations to reduce complexity and improve scale.

05:11 Farmers Adopt Cost-Saving Tools, Not New Habits: Felix found that Southeast Asian farmers don’t chase productivity—they adopt tools that reduce cost and keep daily routines intact.

13:20 Scaling Without Feed Mill Support: With no guaranteed offtake from large feed companies, Full Circle started producing and selling its own pellets to collect farmer data and grow sales.

24:35 Southeast Asia is Agritech’s Edge: Fragmented supply chains and extreme price sensitivity make the region ideal for fast adoption of low-carbon, affordable feed solutions.

29:00 Carbon Credits Are Unreliable: Felix explains that while carbon credits are theoretically valuable, their volatility and complexity make them less effective than carbon taxes or direct market incentives for driving real change in food systems.

(00:56) Jeremy Au: Hey, Felix. Good to have you the show.

(00:58) Felix: Great to be here.

(00:59) Jeremy Au: So (01:00) what we're interested in is hearing about your story. Please tell everybody about yourself.

(01:04) Felix: So I'm Felix Collins. I'm the founder of Full Circle Biotech. I've been in the biotech since 2016. Straight from university. Was a founder during university and made my way from the UK to Thailand where I now live. Our company's headquartered in Singapore.

(01:21) We have operations in Thailand. We have teams in the UK and the US as well.

(01:25) Jeremy Au: what do you currently do in your company?

(01:28) Felix: we deploy biological ecosystems to solve protein problems. This is a scientific term, but what it really means is we. use groups of different species. So we use insects, we use fungi, we use bacteria to take food, waste, agricultural waste, pretty much any byproducts and convert it into protein in an incredibly efficient way. So there are lots of different forms of novel protein. There are massive problems in the protein industry. The protein we all eat has huge carbon footprints. It has huge human footprints as (02:00) well. There aren't many good alternatives. We've seen novel proteins in the human food space, you know, beyond meat that sort of thing. the biggest impact we believe can be created by changing the diets of animals. animals aren't fussy, they don't care about branding. If you change the minds of a few farmers, you can create impact that touches millions of people. So that's what we do.

(02:22) Jeremy Au: Great. So let's go back to the beginning. So you've been entrepreneur for a long time and I, I think you've built two previous companies before this. could you tell us. About the first startup that you built out of the University of Warwick.

(02:34) Felix: Yeah, absolutely. So the University of Warwick, I studied psychology with some business modules. Warwick is a fantastic business school. during a psychology lecture, I learned about this thing called Korsakoff syndrome, which was utterly terrifying. It gives you dementia if you drink too much, basically. And I was a student, all my friends were students. So it was pretty concerning to my entire friendship group. I was mentioning this with one of my friends who I go to bars with and (03:00) discuss business. he said, is there a way of preventing it? Effectively it's vitamin B one which is very alcohol soluble. So if you drink, make sure you, you take vitamin B supplements 'cause alcohol strips it from your body. And so we started putting vitamins into our drinks We put antioxidants in, over 10 different compounds into our drinks and. We decided we wanted to actually take this to a nightclub, so I put it in a spray bottle the next day woke up at 6:00 AM which was rare for a university student felt amazing. Phoned my friend who was never up before 12 and he felt the same, we thought, what's happened? Turns out we accidentally discovered a novel application for this particular antioxidant called NAC. People have been trying to make it work through intravenous application, through taking pills, for some reason putting it into, into a spray. Spraying it under your tongue you to absorb it way more effectively than many other means. So we were getting this antioxidant that protected the body against alcohol. We (04:00) thought, let's turn this into a business. We launched it at university and had a deal with a company in Thailand. My business partner was Tai. We had to deal, deal with the company in Thailand to bring it over, market it in the nightclubs in Thailand. we raised just a small amount of money, put everything into inventory, shipped it over, it got seized at the border. I still don't fully know what happened. I'm guessing didn't pay someone, but I was left completely outta the loop. So had a big hole in our pockets but we still believed in the product. at this time, the EU started promoting the use of insects in Aqua Feeded. And this was completely different industry. I'd never heard of insects and acro feeded. I had no idea about the feed industry. I had no idea. No idea about why we needed novel sources of protein. the more I looked into it, the more compelling. it became the more finding a solution for damaging protein seemed to be. So we looked to effectively just trade insects from Thailand, which, has been farming insects for hundreds of years (05:00) with Europe. But the only problem was no one in Thailand was, was farming. The insects at the eu, were promoting for animal feed.

(05:07) So we thought, okay, let's try starting a farm.

(05:09) Jeremy Au: No, I think it's really interesting. And I think what's interesting is that you've also built a second company in helping farmers and educate them. Could you share more about what you learned from there? 

(05:20) Felix: So as soon as we learned about the damaging impacts of protein and the potential of this little insect to help plug the gaps, we realized no one in Thailand was making it we ran into a friend at university who was pretty well connected in Kenya. Kenya's got a good environment. it's actually got one of the leading insect research organizations called the EP. How about we try and do contract farming build a company where we get loads of farmers to farm. These black soldier flies. We help to lift them poverty by giving them a new revenue stream. let's just try it out. We got support from the Queen's Commonwealth Trust the Queen of England. we, got onto the ground, it was unbelievably (06:00) difficult. teaching farmers from a different culture, even when you have a Kenyan on board, teaching them about a system that is completely alien to them was a very difficult thing to do.

(06:12) We tried it with a few farmers and we got no traction at all. Things took like 10 times longer than they should have done. And we sat down. And we had a discussion and we thought, If we actually are serious about creating impact and we're serious about creating carbon impact it makes more sense to do this in a centralized location at a larger scale. there are too many confounding factors. There are too many potential failure points and it's going to be too hard to scale up.

(06:36) Jeremy Au: Yeah, I think it's interesting because you shared about how it's kind of difficult to educate farmers, and I think there's so many startups in Agritech who are going after, this modality of working farmers, partnering with farmers. Educating them about productivity. So what have been your learnings about this?

(06:53) Felix: Yeah, I think you have to work with systems that farmers already understand (07:00) and the number one system is saving money. if you come up with a way to save farmers money. Without them having to change much of their daily routines, I think you'll find adoption rates are far higher. there are some fantastic startups doing this with biochar. One of our investors has a project, looking at decarbonizing rice. with very simple changes to farming techniques. easy for farmers to do and the carbon savings are immense.

(07:24) So I think there have been a lot of companies that have, high ambitions in how they can change farmers' behaviors. But I haven't seen many successes on that front unless you provide cost savings and slip into systems they already understand.

(07:39) Jeremy Au: I like what you said about how farmers most easily understand the idea of saving money. that's quite different from the pitch of normally saying that farmers. Should learn how to, I know, increase productivity. I guess that'd be the most common I think make more money obviously is another of saying the same statement, but a different way.

(07:55) And then now you talked about saving money. Could you talk a little bit more about (08:00) how your current company helps people and farmers save money from their perspective?

(08:04) Felix: So we have saved farmers on average, 12% on their feed costs. because we turn byproducts into protein we have managed to hit quality parameters that are. neck and neck with the world's leading protein commodity, fish meal. it's pretty much the top in terms of quality. And we've managed to do it at a slightly cheaper price than fish meal. What that means is we can take that protein, put it into pellets that farmers use every day. We don't even mention sustainability. We just say, Hey, we have a lower cost feed for you. Try it out. And farmers try it out and normally say, okay, not only is this saving us money, but we can see the differences in the animals as well. we're operating in a sector where small differences to, to how healthy an ingredient is go a long, long way. ' we've got a global food system that's much more designed on. Economies of scale, and nutritional engineering. (09:00) You might know a bit about soy but it's the number one protein commodity. it has massive amounts of volume. 300 million tons used in animal feed a year, I think. But it's got a lot of anti nutritional factors. So by producing an ingredient that lowers cost, that doesn't have anti nutritional factors, that goes straight to farmers, us to make massive amounts of change in terms of carbon reduction. It allows us to save farmers money and we can see the impacts. it's incredibly rewarding.

(09:27) Jeremy Au: what's interesting is obviously your develop position of better or say cheaper feed is really interesting. Could you share about how you actually make it happen? So, you know, black fly, 

(09:38) Felix: Yeah. 

(09:39) Jeremy Au: fly 

(09:39) Felix: flies. 

(09:40) Jeremy Au: black soldier, fly lave. There we go. So it's a scary name and I, you know, walk through the step of how that actually happens here.

(09:47) Felix: Yeah, so when we set up in Thailand we, in 2019 launched Thailand's first commercial black soldier fly farm. It became clear quite quickly to me. the industry has a lot of promise, but I think there are (10:00) unique pressures in Thailand it's very challenging to do here. And the two big ones are number one. Cost of waste is pretty high Thai. People don't like wasting things. and there's massive amounts of competition for waste, which is pretty different to Europe. and number two, the price of protein is pretty much the lowest in the world. fishmeal, the commodity I mentioned earlier, in the Gulf of Thailand, there's been huge slavery scandals where. People are taken from Myanmar, put on boats, and their passports are taken and they're forced to fish, trash fish from the gulf. Pretty horrifying, but slavery depresses price. So it's a sector with pretty tight margins. that meant traditional black soldierly technology, which normally gets three kilos of protein for every a hundred kilos of input. It very, very difficult to make work here. and I had a, I guess, fortuitous experience where my co-founder that set up the Thai farm with me said, you know what? This is never going to work. He, he saw the unity economics and he went back to his family business (11:00) and I was left during covid nine months in a condo. Didn't know anyone here, didn't really speak the language. so it was just me and a computer. And I used that time to, basically, I hypothesized a way to get other species into, into the system to do what black soldier flies do, but with fungi, with bacteria, and with loads and loads and loads of them, had an ecosystem on paper.

(11:21) It, made sense. I mean, I'm not a trained biologist, but I was emailing with professors around the world, So raised a small amount of cash to try it out. after the first year, instead of producing three kilos of protein for every a hundred kilos of input, we were getting 20 kilos of protein. that immediately showed us that we had a way to make novel protein affordable just by increasing efficiencies. we've continued that. We're now at something like 45% yield. So 45 kilos of protein for every a hundred kilos of input. which means we're price competitive with fish meal in probably the most price sensitive markets in the world for protein.

(11:57) Jeremy Au: yeah, I find the phrase slavery lowest prices (12:00) to be 

(12:00) Felix: Yeah.

(12:00) Jeremy Au: Fair statement in a sense that, this kind of dentured wage labor is one feature, Of these industries that are trying to push for massive costs. 

(12:09) Felix: Yeah.

(12:10) Jeremy Au: I think what's interesting of cost is that you're approaching it from an efficiency perspective of the conversion. What's the maximum you think is the theoretical yield from, a hundred percent. what do you think is the theoretical maximum for that conversion ratio?

(12:21) Felix: theoretical yield is 90% with our technology, basically requires having completely dry input, like bone dry input, which doesn't exist, but if it did, we could get around 90%.

(12:32) Jeremy Au: that's interesting, right? there's a classic relative benchmarking. I would love for you to share, what's the, standard ecosystem science textbook of like sunlight to grass, grass to. Cows, cows to humans. What's the general range of conversion ratios for these,

(12:47) Felix: Wow. There's a whole science behind that and I'm afraid, I don't really know. 

(12:53) Jeremy Au: Yeah,

(12:53) Felix: a generalist.

(12:54) Jeremy Au: I was wondering you know, if I ate a piece of steak, would it be 45% conversion or

(12:59) Felix: well,

(12:59) Jeremy Au: how would (13:00) that look 

(13:00) Felix: you, 

(13:00) Jeremy Au: yeah.

(13:01) Felix: I mean, the thing about most food stuff as we consume, and this is true for food waste as well, it's pretty much 70% moisture. 

(13:07) Jeremy Au: Mm.

(13:07) Felix: the good stuff that you actually get from it, if you can absorb 50% of the protein, I guess it depends how rare you like your steak then you're probably doing something good.

(13:15) But in terms of specific numbers, I'm embarrassed to say I haven't really studied it.

(13:19) Jeremy Au: Yeah. And so talk a little bit more about what it takes for you to kind of have built this out because, you know, I think that for a lot of these startups that talk about, building a better ecosystem, et cetera, A lot of that normally works in a lab or at a very small scale, but ramping it up has often been, the bug bear for almost all I would say alternative proteins, some form of that bioreactors or system culture the efficiency claims made at an early stage pretty much fall apart at that scale up phase.

(13:49) So could you share a bit more about some of the challenges you had in scaling down?

(13:52) Felix: Yeah, to be honest, our main challenge was commercial. It wasn't so much technical. We're selling 30 tons a month at the moment, which is, (14:00) significant for novel protein, but we wouldn't consider that industrial scale yet. We were going down the same pathway as most novel protein companies, which is you have a fantastic ingredient, you have a fantastic product, you prove the unity economics at pilot scale, or you show there's a real chance of those unity economics becoming feasible at industrial scale. But then you run into a massive problem, which is who's going to buy this? Novel ingredient producers go to the big feed companies and say, Hey, we have an ingredient. You should use it. it fits in with all your climate agenda and it's high quality. feed mills basically say, okay, cool.

(14:33) This is interesting. Maybe we'll test it. We'll buy shipments from time to time, basically for testing, but we're not going to give you any binding agreement until you have at least a hundred tons a month. And for most novel feed companies, that's gonna cost five to $15 million. So you're faced with a challenge of how do I raise cash to services demand when the feed companies certainly nowadays are much more (15:00) reluctant to give binding off take agreements. There are a couple cool ways to deal with that. So one of our, there's a company in Thailand that does pure black Soldierly meal called Fly Lab. They've partnered with a massive Japanese conglomerate that basically said, listen, we'll give you an agreement to buy whatever you can produce once you get past a certain scale.

(15:19) But for some reason, Japanese companies are much more willing to give binding agreements than the Cargills and the Retting. we have relationships with Cargill. We have relationships with Retting Nutri Co. But we also just thought, listen, this is gonna take years.

(15:30) I spoke to Alan Leblanc at Callista who said, they spent two years negotiating with Cargill on a facility and, we don't really have that time as a species we need to scale up protein. We need to double the protein we produce. by 2050. We don't really know how we're going to do that what we can get from the ocean is already fully utilized the productivity of agricultural land is going to decrease by that time.

(15:52) So urgency's huge. We solved that by doing what the feed companies do ourselves at a smaller scale. we bypass them for now. and we put our (16:00) ingredient into pellets and that allows us to go straight to farmers and form direct relationships, which most importantly allows us to collect data. So we can go to the farmers, we can understand how they use our product. We can get really, really nitty gritty with what it does to their animals what it does to their yield rates. we can feed that straight back into our product development. And we have an iterative cycle. We can improve our product within three days like a software company.

(16:24) Jeremy Au: And when you talk about that, feedback loop, how exactly do you do that You ask the farmer how it's going, like what does it mean for you to have that learning loop from your perspective? 

(16:33) Felix: Yeah, so the most challenging thing is that farmers certainly in Thailand but I suspect this might be a Southeast Asian thing, go with their gut a lot. And they know their yield, but. In terms of animal health, it's more just they're eyeballing it. the big challenge is how do you turn that into concrete, actionable data? you need to go to the farms. You need to speak with the farmers. You need to build systems that work for them, that also lead to actionable insights for you. there are some weird metrics, Jeremy. So (17:00) one of our was told by his father that he needed to. Convert to us fully instead of just buying pilot samples because the body of the shrimp was the same size as the head, a metric that I had no idea we should look for. But that's a metric that's easy for farmers to tell because they just look at their, so I think you need to get creative and understand that people aren't going to fit into your sort of Excel spreadsheet models. You have to work with them.

(17:28) Jeremy Au: I thought it was a funny phrase to say, you know, as the body of the shrimp at the same size as the head, I've never even thought about that as a statement.

(17:37) Felix: industry.

(17:37) Jeremy Au: What are some other, farmer insights or learnings that you had about farmers that you think, every startup entrepreneur, like yourself and myself, we went to university, Didn't have farming experience, and obviously Excel is part of that process, but I'm curious as you make contact with, the frontline farmers. What other insights have you learned or what things have you had to change your mind on,

(17:58) Felix: Mm,

(17:58) Jeremy Au: as part of that transition to, (18:00) being on the ground?

(18:00) Felix: that's a great question. I've become a lot more accepting of superstition and sort of not, not so much magical thinking, but maybe spiritual thinking. Obviously going to a western university that's sort of beaten outta you. Certainly going through the Western educational system. But give you an example.

(18:16) We went to a province called Callin. This is a rural remote province. we went to one dam, That dam consumed 2000 tons of feed a month. Huge, just on one dam. we spoke to these farmers. One of the farmers was speaking to my co-founder and my co-founder was saying, so what is your feed spend? the guy said, we spend maybe a dollar a kilo on the actual feed pellets and then we buy pig milk for around $3 a kilo. And co-founder went, sorry, pig milk. which can mean a few different things in Thai, it can be a cut of meat. And the farmer said, yeah, pig milk. it turns out this guy properly believes, as does everyone else in this dam that mixing pellets with pig milk creates massive (19:00) differences in fish health, fish survival. I couldn't find any scientific paper supporting this. pig milk is basically just a more watery version of cow's milk that doesn't taste as good. I have no idea milking pigs to sell it to these farmers. And so there's a lot that you just have to sort of accept at face value and work with. And so we just had to say, okay, so if we could reduce your. Dependence on pig milk by providing better quality protein Would you be open to that? they said, yeah, but we don't think you can do it. So we're currently piloting pig milk replacement, which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd say into business. But yeah, I've become a lot more accepting of. that line of thinking, 

(19:38) Jeremy Au: well, you know, the superstitions, you know, everybody has their own personal one, right. You know, or their own quirks. You know, some people believe in the number eight, in Asian culture. Eight is, you know, good luck, right. And the East Asian side. A lot of people in the west avoided number six.

(19:55) You know, that's another way

(19:56) Felix: it's

(19:56) Jeremy Au: studying still happens. So, you know, I think it depends (20:00) numerology, you know, things like that.

(20:01) Felix: Yeah.

(20:01) Jeremy Au: I'm just kind of curious as you know, you said you've been working on commercial has been the biggest challenge. Could you share a little bit more about what you've done to improve your commercial go to market?

(20:11) Felix: we just took matters into our own hands. We saw the pathway that lies ahead. it's a pathway forged by some European and American trailblazers. I went on a tour last year speaking to novel protein founders, speaking to novel protein VCs to basically get a sense of strategies that really work.

(20:28) It was kind of telling, there were very few success stories Founders that have built up to industrial scale, maintained industrial scale, but the few ones that did partnered with much larger companies with JVs. Callista is a company that makes protein from bacteria, single cell protein. They eat methane. They turn, greenhouse gases into protein, which is a fantastic idea. But they're in their 13th year now and they're still finding it difficult to get to operational commercial scale. there are two pathways, right? You can go. The traditional route, go to big companies that (21:00) hold your hand, that provide funding, that help you build up big plants that get you to economy of scale. Or you can try and do it yourself. And when you try and do it yourself and you've got your back against the wall, you come up with creative ideas like Doing the feed mills job for them, at least for now. So you can access the market faster. And for us, the most important thing was accessing the market. we're a deep tech company that's been forced to monetize early. There's still so much about our technology to develop. But we, I mean traction and repeat customers that tells you things that you can never learn in the lab. there aren't enough people taking risks of going to market with. basically an MVP stuff that you get taught in business school. go to market, stay lean, iterate, but it's really hard to do in biotech.

(21:44) It's hard to do in novel protein. but I think it's possible and more founders should be trying it.

(21:48) Jeremy Au: what advice would you give to founders from your perspective?

(21:51) Felix: I think try to do as much as you can with as little money as possible. that's easy to say in the current Economy where US stock markets are going crazy. (22:00) Angel investing is probably drying up right now. and VC money is flowing less into T Protein. my advice would be don't try and rebrand yourself as an AI company just to get capital. do what you can with the capital that you have and make it work. I mean, there are, there's always a solution to. Problems and that includes commercial problems. And there are always gonna be creative things that you can do to monetize your product early.

(22:21) But be patient and just keep iterating, fail, just do it really quickly.

(22:24) Jeremy Au: I thought it was interesting to hear your perspective on improving feed efficiency. Is that the only product you're gonna build?

(22:32) is it just about improving the efficiency of the meal production process that lowers the cost? Is that the way that we should think about the product?

(22:39) Felix: We think of ourselves more as a technology. We're working towards something. We call everything tech and we're testing that now, but it's gonna take years before we fully manage it. There are loads of weird byproducts that are kind of difficult to use in almost any context.

(22:54) A lot of them have massive amounts of fiber. and then there are loads of products that have. (23:00) agricultural applications, stuff like soy but are pretty expensive to process we think our technology is able to take any organic input and convert that into a complete feed ingredient. So for us, we are looking at byproducts now 'cause it's relatively easy to access. We don't need to get massive economies of scale, like buying massive amounts of soy. But in our tests, seen our technology effectively do the job of heavy machinery. 

(23:27) Humans worked out that We can build these massive machines, pump 'em full of diesel or whatever. Pretty uncomfortable to work around, but they can take big quantities of input and process that into powder or whatever that can then be shipped around the world. this is great, but carbon footprint is high and the costs of running machines, with energy is really, really high.

(23:49) we don't have super cheap energy from renewables and rely on fossil fuels it's just expensive to run. and so we've done initial tests and we're going to expand those tests, but we've taken (24:00) raw materials processed by heavy machines, not just byproducts. put them into our technology. And at the end of the day, we've got a product that can go straight into feed pellets. Doesn't need to be mixed with anything else apart from a few additives. we see these industrial era heavy machines being replaced by biological processes sure there's a bit of noise when scaling up.

(24:21) There's a bit of inconsistencies, but when you nail the inconsistencies, biological processes are so much more cost effective. they can be done locally. at the source of waste, at the source of raw material. And that's where we see the future going.

(24:33) That's what we're betting our company on 

(24:35) Jeremy Au: when you look at that scale up, what do you think about agritech from your perspective? Obviously we had e fishery that was, you know, darling, and I think there was. Obviously, you know, one stop shop across multiple components. They also were making an argument that they were helping improve the, you know, inputs process, right for farmers as a business line.

(24:55) They're also helping educate farmers about how to you know, kind of be (25:00) better with the timing and automate their feeding processes. Could you share a little bit more about how you see Agritech developing?

(25:06) Felix: absolutely. And by the way, your, e Fishery podcast was fantastic. I learned so much from that. Yeah, I think we have been looking at agritech like it's biotech that comes from our learnings from pharmaceuticals, long development periods, especially when it's not just a software layer and put it into the field.

(25:22) Test it for a long time, long development, often relying on a lot of capital, often benefiting from government subsidies. And I don't think this is a model. That really needs, to exist. For most products, the way I think about agritech is it's like an incredibly cheap Tesla or electric car. think of how much money it takes to buy an electric car look at the decarbonization impact of that agritech. the potential to create the impact of one electric car. With 1000th of the spend. I think that Southeast Asia specifically has the edge over Europe. It has the (26:00) edge over America when it comes to implementing this technology. And because of that, I think Southeast Asia is going to be the center for the next industrial revolution in food. It's got many factors in its favor. About 90% of the world's fish production happens in Asia, and a lot of it isn't very consolidated. this was e fisheries play.

(26:20) let's consolidate, educate and let's kind of cut out some of the middlemen that increases fish efficiencies in the supply chain. when you inject. Lower carbon solutions. They can be biochar, they can be different ways of farming rice. They can be novel proteins. When you inject that into the system and there's no impact on costs, you do it cost effectively. can change an industry unbelievably quickly. You don't need to build gigafactories to assemble loads of different electric car components. you don't need to build complex battery supply chains. You can turn an industry from being highly polluting, high carbon into ultra low carbon. Almost overnight.

(26:55) I mean, we do that with farms overnight. if humanity still thinks it's important to (27:00) decarbonize, food systems are going to be one of the most impactful, fastest. And to be honest, most exciting ways we can do that I think Southeast Asia is it has pretty much every factor, its way. Price pressures, price sensitivity, which I think is a good thing because it means if you compete on price adoption's fast, it's got the right ecosystems. Maybe farmers are a bit hard to access, but networks exist it's a phenomenal place to build a business in the sector.

(27:26) Jeremy Au: You know, I think I like what you said about if you believe that you can get people to change their inputs and make this a low carbon perspective. the first thing you mentioned, is the. Carbon intensity, of the industry.

(27:38) the mission to lower carbon intensity, that's one. And then two, of course, is your belief that happens quickly if you're able to figure out the inputs and the pharma behavior necessary for that. Does it come across as too optimistic? Using my normal hat on, I would be like farming will always be high carbon and we'll get it, lower carbon intensity (28:00) by virtue of more productivity, but it's never really gonna change. And if there's any change, it's gonna be slow. How would you respond to that set of criticism?

(28:08) Felix: Yeah, I think business is normal. That's a fair criticism. But when you have new technology that. Is cost effective and doesn't rely on high tech, sophisticated expensive systems, then I think we are seeing change all around us. I mean, the traction that's happening in biochar and investors like biochar because you can like hold the carbon in your hand, right? traction that we're seeing in that is phenomenal. It's lightning fast. There's a company called Husk founded in Cambodia, Operating in several regions across Southeast Asia and getting big buy-in from agricultural companies literally you just install a burner to create the biochar and you're absorbing carbon. I think that's way more effective than removing carbon from air way less contentious. in our case, we've gone from looking at farms that consume 30 tons of, you know, fishmeal a month One ton of fishmeal (29:00) has the same. Impact on the environment about five tons of coal. It's kind of difficult to get specific numbers, but those are scientific estimates. So if we're replacing 30 tons of fish that's the equivalent of taking 150 tons of coal the system overnight with one sale. I think business as usual is slow, massive, complicated supply chains, it doesn't need to be. that. there are loads of companies, a lot of them under the radar making huge changes overnight with very little fanfare.

(29:28) Jeremy Au: So when you think about carbon intensity and the change of that, is there a way to layer on, carbon credits? It feels like, everybody is saying if you switch out carbon, you should get rewarded by carbon credits. And right now you've obviously been rewarded by farmers who are switching from, fee to you.

(29:44) But is that really on carbon credits as well?

(29:47) Felix: for our specific technology, there is a way, but you need to, there's so much methodology there. There have been people working on carbon credit methodologies for insect production for years. Doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. some people are very, very close. (30:00) from my perspective, this is probably an unpopular view. I think carbon taxes are gonna be way more effective than carbon credits. setting up market dynamics that reward lower carbon companies with market share instead of creating a revenue stream that is always probably going to be quite unreliable, quite volatile. is probably a better way to go. Think carbon credit financing on the private markets are a lot more appealing, because you make deals with companies, everyone knows what they're getting into. There's a lot less opportunity for greenwashing. But I think financialized systems, unless they're watertight, there's always gonna be a risk of them not really achieving what they're set out to achieve. from my perspective, if other feed companies are taxed, and. we are not, because we're ultra low carbon that's gonna make life way better for the farmers because it brings our costs down. And makes life better for pretty much everyone but the polluters and provides way more incentive than rewards.

(30:53) human beings are way more scared of losing something than they are of gaining things. And that's been proven in loads of (31:00) psychological experiments.

(31:00) Jeremy Au: On that note, could you share A story about time that you've been brave.

(31:03) Felix: Yeah, I don't know if it was brave, but when it was just me with this company, on the basement floor of a townhouse that we had rented try and basically test this technology. Me, surrounded by buckets of waste and worms and stinking and coming home every day absolutely exhausted. and there were points when I thought, do I have The strength to really keep going. Yeah. So I dunno if that's brave, but maybe that's resilient.

(31:29) Jeremy Au: and could you share about maybe some of the. Motions that you had at that point of time.

(31:33) Felix: Incredible self-doubt. I think a lot of founders face incredible self-doubt, this was a technology that I'd basically drawn out on a flow chart and people had invested their money into seeing if this would play out. 

(31:47) Like how do I prove a new technology? There were just so many questions. the only thing you can do is keep your head down, keep going, keep going to the next milestone. Stay focused on that. And if you fail, people are a lot more accepting of failure than when you're in (32:00) the moment and worrying about all of that. 

(32:01) Jeremy Au: Yeah. On that note, thank you so much for sharing. I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways. First thank you for sharing about your early entrepreneur experience and what you learned from, having your first startup fail from effectively having your shipment ceased all the way to.

(32:16) building a second company and figuring out that educating farmers on a standalone business is difficult. it's interesting to hear your learnings and advice for other founders. Secondly, thanks for sharing about your company and about how you're approaching.

(32:28) It not just from a alternative protein perspective, but also layering in other organisms to help with that process. Increase efficiency and tasks, make it seamless for farmers because they would rather save money for the same quality rather than, for example, improve quality or improve revenue.

(32:45) This is much better sales pitch from their perspective. And lastly, thanks so much for sharing about Agritech in general it's not just about the e fishery scandal but it's also about how you see that there's huge upside opportunity, enduring carbon intensity.

(32:59) The fact that, (33:00) it is still the industry for so many jobs across Asia and the amount of impact that somebody can have on carbon intensity and therefore climate change So thank you so much Felix, for sharing your experience.

(33:11) Felix: Thanks so much, Jeremy. pleasure to speak to you.