The next big cash cow?
Investors who made their mark with Bellamy’s are looking for greener pastures through small companies
AGROUP of smart and flush Tasmanians is lining up its ducks to create “the next Bellamy’s” cash cow — without cows.
What does Pure Foods Tasmania have in mind, then, to deliver the milky glow of success of the infant formula company founded in Launceston in 2003?
And who is behind the company, which listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on April 30?
Essentially, the same people who originally invested in Bellamy’s Organic, which sold to China Mengniu Dairy Company last year for $1.5 billion.
“Pure Foods Tasmania was founded by the original Bellamy’s shareholders in 2015 with the idea to build the next Bellamy’s by acquiring local food businesses and scaling them up,” managing director Michael Cooper said at a midweek meeting.
PFT already owns and operates two businesses: Tasmanian Pate, which supplies major supermarkets; and Woodbridge Smokehouse, which makes artisan smoked salmon and trout.
And it has bullish plans. “We want it to have a revenue in sales of more than $50 million in 18 months through growth of these two trading entities and acquisitions,” Mr Cooper said.
Sounds ambitious, with current turnover just a tenth of that amount, but the company is flush with $3.5 million, having raised that amount in its first public offering.
Where to jump, though? And what might its direction flag about Tasmania’s food future? I’d say PFT’s interest in developing local plantbased technologies and manufacturing is the category to watch.
When I squeezed Mr Cooper, the former Juicy Isle boss, for detail, he mentioned cultivated meats and flagged a shift in interest away from dairy, a notable pivot given the Bellamy’s investor backstory.
Another area for growth was ready-to-eat meals, with coronavirus restrictions supercharging Australians’ appetite for it.
“We are looking at meal solutions,” Mr Cooper said.
It all sounded pretty timely, including PFT’s Asia focus.
“PFT is not focusing on
China for its Asian markets,” Mr Cooper said. “It’s a lot easier to do business in Hong Kong, Singapore and, increasingly, in Vietnam.”
On Friday, food futurist Tony Hunter shared a SWOT analysis of a plant-based meat future.
“If China grows its own [cultivated] meat, what does that mean for Australia?” Mr Hunter asked in a newsletter. “You can’t protect yourself from a better technology in a global market … Australia needs to invest, and quickly, in alternative meat technologies.”
Enough already of meanspirited commentary about Disappearing Tarn pilgrims trekking in from the Springs on kunanyi/Mt Wellington to behold the closest thing to a miracle currently on offer. I recoil from this narkiness, especially with coronavirus cancelling that other bracing community-building plunge,
Dark Mofo’s Winter Solstice Nude Swim. And especially when it’s coming from people who themselves have visited the tarn. I think they are called hypocrites.
My mention here last week of my eldest daughter’s dip in the ephemeral mountain pool elicited mail. One letter writer quoted a line from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each man kills the thing he loves …” She was referring, I think, to dainty trackside plants trampled by muddy pilgrims — an impressively hardcore green appropriation of a line penned about a man’s murder of his wife. I’d have been dismayed, though, if our young folk had not, in their laid-off leisure, flocked to the site in awe and wonder.
Still, this letter writer made a good point, my go-to man of the mountain said. Walk on kunanyi hiking guide Andy Crawford first visited the Disappearing Tarn two decades ago and he’s been back twice this time around. “It was a different experience sharing it with other people, but the crowd was very hushed and respectful,” he said.
Mr Crawford suggested that instead of complaining, we focus on better managing higher visitation, including a track upgrade, now that the cat’s out of the bag.
“The track itself is pretty badly damaged,” he said. “Once you get soil compaction on muddy trails, they sort of never recover fully.
“The track needs huge intervention now to bring it up to a standard of other trails in the state that get this amount of foot traffic, even intermittently.”
The annual spend on the mountain, which is managed by Wellington Park Trust, was tiny compared with National Parks budgets.
What a sight, though, the crystal-clear tarn! “It’s special and rare,” Mr Crawford said. “These things only happen a few times of year … and this event is a bellwether for how people are craving to get back to nature. I liken it to other things in Tasmania like the auroras or bioluminescence or a point swell, when surfers take the day off work to get out there.”