Episode Summary

🌿Brewing a Sustainable Future with Lab-Grown Palm Oil – Mick Liubinskas sits down with Tom Collier, CEO and co-founder of Levur, to uncover how precision fermentation is transforming the palm oil industry.

Palm oil is found in 50% of supermarket products and 70% of cosmetics, yet its production is a major driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and carbon emissions. Levur is tackling this crisis by using synthetic biology to brew palm oil in a lab, eliminating the need for rainforest destruction. Tom shares his journey from molecular biology to entrepreneurship, the challenges of scaling biotech solutions, and why global regulations and corporate demand are accelerating the shift to sustainable alternatives.

From waste-to-feedstock innovation to mass fermentation at industrial scale, this episode explores how lab-grown palm oil could reshape the future of food, cosmetics, and climate tech.

💡 Tune in to learn why regulation, consumer pressure, and cost-efficiency are aligning to drive massive change—and why sustainable solutions must not only be greener but cheaper and better to win the market!

⏱️ Time Stamps

00:00 – Introduction: Live from Macquarie University’s Synthetic Biology Lab

00:24 – Meet Tom Collier and Levur’s mission to brew palm oil

01:07 – The devastating impact of palm oil production

02:05 – Why global demand for palm oil is set to quadruple by 2050

03:12 – How microbes and precision fermentation create sustainable palm oil

06:11 – Why palm oil is used in everything from chocolate to shampoo

08:43 – Scaling up: From lab samples to industrial fermentation

12:03 – Overcoming biotech manufacturing bottlenecks

16:01 – The challenge of making sustainable products cost-competitive

18:44 – How waste feedstocks can power a circular economy

19:38 – Why Europe’s palm oil regulations are a game-changer for Levur

22:08 – The $70M ton problem: Can lab-grown palm oil scale fast enough?

24:14 – 2025 goals: Delivering first samples and proving market fit

26:29 – The path to mass adoption and commercial success

Resources Mentioned

🔗Levur – Brewing sustainable palm oil with precision fermentation

🤝Levur’s Linkedin🙋🏻‍♂️Tom’s Linkedin🌱 EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) – Banning unsustainable palm oil imports

📊 Australian Genome Foundry – Supporting synthetic biology startups

🔬 Macquarie University’s Synthetic Biology Lab – Cutting-edge research in bioengineering

📖 Net Positive by Paul Polman – How businesses can lead sustainability transformations

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Hey everybody, it's Mick Liubinskas here from Climate Salad and we've got another episode of The Mix podcast. We're coming to you from Macquarie University, and I've just had an incredible tour of the lab here. We're going to hear all about some incredible innovation.

I'm here with Tom from Levur. Tom, tell us all about it.

Hi Mick, thanks for having me.

Hi everybody. Yeah, I'm Tom Collier, the CEO and co-founder of Levur, and we are a precision fermentation synthetic biology company. In a nutshell, what we do is guide microbes like yeast through fermentation to produce products for different industries.

In particular, we produce and brew palm oil. So instead of a rainforest, we actually are able to do this, theoretically, under a city car park, on circular waste feedstocks is our end goal.

There's a lot in there and I think people are probably aware of palm oil, but let's talk about the impacts of why you dedicated your life and the next 10 years of it.

Yeah, it actually goes back over a decade now when my then girlfriend, now wife, who I met here at Macquarie, and we were both studying. She was doing law, I was doing science, and she just returned from a trip to Borneo where she'd followed her father filming a deforestation documentary for Animal Planet.

What she saw there was quite destructive and it was quite moving. So when she was telling me about it, I couldn't help but look into it myself to learn what are these problems.

Give me the focus.

Yeah, that was, it was quite hard to hear. There's also quite a strong realization looking into what's happening and how you make palm oil and all the destruction, rainforest deforestation, all of these things that have to go into it, animals displaced, species extinction. Realizing that even if you made a palm tree more efficient or had better agricultural practices, it's very unlikely to change anything into the future or meet up with the growing demand and requirements in the system.

So I've calculated some easy numbers around. Global demand is looking to be like four times larger by 2050. So that's a huge part of our equatorial based planet that has to be converted over to palm oil production. So why is this growing? Well, it's in 50 percent of our supermarket products and up to 70 percent of our cosmetics.

So it's not going away anytime soon. It's a good chance you probably use it today. I know I have even just washing my hands. Or, you know, using drinking certain products or just going to the supermarket, you'll probably find it cut in with other types of oils. Realizing all of that, I was doing my undergrad at the time in molecular biology and started to look down the line of, is it possible to use microbes, uh, who also, you know, You know, we're all related by DNA and different metabolic pathways that tells us what we all do.

And yeah, I realized it is, it is possible and viable. So then I did a master's and a PhD, so I haven't completed that 30 PhD, but almost been distracted by building this company because it's just, it's been so exciting to pull it forward and the theme and the goal and the outcome was to actually use yeast to grow palm oil.

So that's been a big part of why we started and now we're a great team. I think we're up to six people. Uh, we started about 18 months ago closed out, you know, two early rounds of investment to complete a precede. We are running as fast as we can this year to get our early samples to a lot of these larger corporates who use orders of magnitude for palm oil, you know, so some cases 800 million tons a year, which is just ridiculous.

Thanks, man. That's a really good background. So interesting to dig in on a few, on a few points, the one that you just covered there I think is really interesting is that when you mentioned you've used it a few times today and obviously you're trying to not use it. So it's obvious, you're not obviously going anywhere to use it, but it's, it's almost impossible to, to completely avoid it.

What is it about palm oil, which makes it so valuable? Why do people use it in so many products?

It's the molecular makeup of it. Um, there's actually a very simple diagram that keeps everyone focused on. Palm oil is really made up of something called a triglyceride. It has a backbone, it has three squiggly tails.

So we all, we all know, maybe from our exposure to food in high school, chemistry or, um, PDHB, but we all know about palm oil. Polyunsaturated fatty acids and saturated fatty acids. And, you know, some are good for your heart and some are bad for your heart. And then you have omega 3s, you know, omega 3s are good for your heart.

Omega 6s are not so good in some scenarios, but get used by the brain well. A lot of life shares this common chemistry. So yeast cells, uh, make these molecules. Human cells make these molecules. Tree cells are particularly seed oils. Palm in particular is a fruit oil, but seed oils like canola, uh, sunflower oil, they all, uh, make these similar type structures.

When it comes to palm, and it's very applicable to a lot of other seed oils, but palm is really good at being what you would call So it's generally once it's been heavily processed, uh, it is generally colorless, odourless. Um, it's generally quite transparent. It blends quite nicely, um, with different products.

So whether it's a cosmetic moisturizer, it blends right in and lets the. You know, in the cosmetic world, they have what are called active ingredients, um, or emulsions. It lets the other things take, take point and shine, uh, what, uh, outshine physically, but also, uh, metaphorically, the other products. But when you think about something like chocolate, you know, it's a really good example.

Chocolate and margarine, uh, palm oil goes into these types of products because of this structure, uh, it has, and there are variations of this structure that already changed slightly, but when you have those certain combinations and there's certain variations, you'll have a solid. With this fat in it, an oil is a fat, that at 30 degrees is solid, but at 37 degrees is, is melting or even tighter, uh, temperature changes.

So that's why you have chocolate on the table, solid, but as soon as you put it in your mouth, it's starting to melt. That's a desirable characteristic for some, for many, many different products. Very similar with margarine. Uh, it's actually one of the margarine and other products are the driving cause of why we now use seed oils and.

You know, palm oil as well in a lot of our products, you know, cooking oils. If you look back into, I think it's pre 19, 19, 10, um, it wasn't a common thing to use, to cook, cook with these types of oils. It really came from a Billy was Procter and Gamble made our wonder product. Uh, I've forgotten the name that they put on it, but now we have billions and billions of, um, tons of, sorry, millions and millions of tons of this every year.

So

that's a little bit of the science behind, um, What we try to do and I'll wrap that very quickly on on that question is. That's where our liver and our positioning comes in quite strong. The control over the profile of these molecules is really where we, where we shine. It's very hard to ask plants to do things that are different to what they naturally or natively do.

Uh, we're able to guide our use through a process to encourage them to produce different oils of low and high value for different customers. So we talk with cosmetic customers, nutraceutical customers, as well as food customers for nutrition.

Yeah, interesting. I think it's amazing, again, where the climate problems, uh, did not cause just because Proctor Gamble made a product decision a while ago, but it's kind of like the combination of that and then the increasingly like, I don't use butter, these products are better.

Um, and then. Um, just growth of scale of population, growth, consumption, um, growth of the middle class who are consuming more of these products, uh, and luxury items as well, like chocolate and cosmetics that they're luxury items, right? They're not, they're not, they're not necessities, but they're all growing.

And they're, you know, when you considering guys, 8 billion people, that's just a massive. Um, demand. And then that, and countries, um, like Indonesia are knocking down old growth rainforests in order to grow more palm oil to sell it too, so we can eat more chocolate palm, more cosmetics. Mm-hmm. Uh, and that's like a negative circular outcome for the environment.

Mm-hmm. And your, your goal is to insert in there a, um, a manufactured palm oil, um, that's lab grown. Um, tell me about like the two interesting questions over there. One is right now you're in a lab. How do we get that to scale? And the one overlapping that is how do we make sure that process is not also negative for the environment?

They like to say, well, you can have soy milk or oatmeal, but that's also bad. Like it's really hard. You've got to, you've got to make sure that the, the, the onus of responsibility is higher, right? Like you can't be like it's slightly better or it's temporarily better. It's got to be just better. Right. It's got to be as good and then better.

Like that's really, yeah.

Yeah. You've hit the nail on the head of a lot of the problems, um, that, you know, not just liver, but just globally you face, uh, when you start talking about the category or. Sustainability. Yeah. You have to hold yourself accountable to the, to the standard that you're casting onto anybody else.

Yeah. And you're spot on with the growing need for it. You know, this population, we have a lot of people to feed. We have a lot of rise in the middle class. We have. Major consumption, uh, desires. So one of the things, and I'll, I'll move to the sustainability point in a second, but one of the things that is out kind of, or at least one of my personal goals for liver, um, which our team is, is working on is.

It's giving back the autonomy to the, to the end user. So the end user is the person at the supermarket shelf who is sick of having to feel bad about every single product or look at the back of every single second product to figure out if it's got something bad for the environment in it. Our goal is to give back the autonomy so that they can see a logo, you know, see a logo on the front of the bottle and go, yep, you know, I know this one's going to be sustainable.

I know this is meeting my price expectations, my product expectations and my sustainability. So that's a big, that'd be an amazing win for our team. And I imagine you're very similar companies in this space. Then moving on to the scale issue, it's actually relatively straightforward, you know, and that's an oversimplification of the point, without going into every single detail, which is, you know, what will be the part of part of our lives for the next five to 10 years.

We use yeast, which has been known and shown to scale ridiculously high, like you better have it. Ever had a mainstream beer, not a microbrewery or a craft brew beer, but you ever had a mainstream, you know, um, Budweiser, if I'm gonna speak to a global audience, Yep. Or a Sure. Or a Stella. Stella Heineken.

Yeah. You know, a good old VB. Yeah. Um, or, you know, a good old new that's come, most likely that's come out of a massive. 100, 000-liter plus, you know, massive fermentation tank that's taken malt and barley and combined it to with yeast to then make the ethanol to make the beer. Well, we're not that far removed from doing that process, so scaling it, uh, it's not a new, a brand new technology that yeast is changing in our aspect, but the existing infrastructure.

And I'm. I'll speak, you know, you know, clarify this for any scaling experts. I am very much simplifying it here for a general audience. Uh, there are, there are differences, but in general, um, but the one key thing that we do is we work, we will be working with third-party, third-party contract manufacturers.

We have our own small lab-level, you know, six-liter fermentation capacity here in the lab, which allows us to demo strains of different media types to deliver small samples. Yeah. I've got two targets this year. Two global customers, two big corporate customers who want two different molecules for us. You know, in this, in this space that all come from Palm, keeping us true to our mission.

And that capacity enables us to do that. You then step from that lab-level capacity to a pilot demo facility. This can be 10, 000-liter tanks. There are a couple in Australia. Uh, more offshore, but then you really got to go bigger. You have to go minimum 100, 000 liters. And there is capacity out there. It's, it's, it's growing.

I was actually, you know, reading this morning, uh, a book on this, uh, of, of, cause I met an amazing, amazing contact last week, Mark Warner, who's has a company called Liberation Labs and shout out to you, Mark. It was great to talk to you last week. They're tackling along with Cauldron in Australia, they're tackling global fermentation, uh, bottlenecks and how to alleviate that.

As far as funding wise, funding these things, you can go through joint venture mechanisms, you know, very, very, um, you can go through private or debt equity options, you know, right now we're in the VC phase. Just closed out. Uh, we've just leave that news for another time. Yeah, but we're, yeah, we're, we're going through that stage, but, uh, yeah, you might've had another question mixed in there, but

no.

I did throw in multiple. Um, so the, the end result is not that there's going to be a, um, a big, yeah, a bunch of liver operations around the world and plants that produce palm oil and people go and buy a couple of litres. He's at much more like They use your technology to go and make specific palm oils for chocolate or for cosmetics.

Like they use the technology or the fermentation process. What are they buying? Are they just buying palm oil and they're going to use it however they want to use it?

Well, yeah, there's two levels of how we work going forward. So with one of our products, it is a replacement technology, but there are the more specific application ways to do this.

Uh, but you can also have them, you can have. The best of both worlds in theory, you can have a strain that is producing a, uh, UK with, let's say, call it a basic palm and then also targeted high-value oils, uh, pulled through with that process at the same time. So our business model is growing as we grow, how ambitions are growing as we grow.

Today, we're, we're looking to be a strain production company. As well as a demo facility capacity to then hand over or do a joint venture with a particular customer in mind to be globally on site with them, but also, you know, whether that's Australia, Europe or the U. S. or in Southeast Asia, really though, you know, our goal here is to make sure that we are solving our core mission as fast as possible.

Yep.

And to solve this, you know, I've done some early calculations. The volume of palm oil, it's, uh, it's like over 70 million metric tons or more a year. So the volume of this and the amount of fermentation tanks that would be required, it's thousands of companies to actually fully replace what we're aiming for is a mitigation strategy to reduce.

Future and further deforestation with our long-term goal to help reforest as well. So,

yeah,

it's definitely beyond just

our

capacity to solve this problem and it

will

require working with a lot of others.

Yeah, I think that's, that's, I think it's another challenge with people thinking about the problem like, um, Me just not eating chocolate, so it's not going to solve it, although me picking the right chocolate brands could.

Um, I think there, there is definitely better practices we can use with reforestation, um, and deforestation and like land use. And there are better parts of the technology we can use and there's better, uh, what, like there's less waste we could have. Like I think we've got to do, I have to attack it on all fronts.

Um, one note I saw, um, waste to feed stock into the uni. So. This goes to the, uh, the overall benefit of the product. Um, tell us about that. Like, are you, are you able to take another negative and turn it into a positive as a part of that other supply chain?

Yeah. So it's what we're working towards. We are, we are here forward at this point in time, but we've been working with some options to make sure that we can go back and be fully circular.

It's a balance. Um, and I was reading net positive actually this morning by Paul Baumann, the ex Unilever CEOs. Um, and one thing stuck out to me while reading it, it was recognizing that even when you have a 10 or 15 billion revenue company tackling sustainability, you are, you can't do everything all at once.

There is a balance to it, you know, in our example, we need to work with. Optimizing and having the best sort of yeast for the target molecule. We can produce to actually do those, those steps. You, you don't want to vary the

feedstock

because, you know, very similar to humans. If you eat one thing for a month, you're going to be very, feel very different at the end of that month.

If you have just pizza for a month versus if you have. Just salad for a month. Um, not saying either or all is fair or worse. Um, but variety. We're not

called Climate Pizza. We want to don't lose our salad sponsors. Yes.

So if you're having, let's just say in this analogy, you know, our yeast. It's really good at eating salad and it gives us a consistent oil profile, which is for our target

customer.

For

us to go and mix in with salad, pasta, pasta, salad, um, then you would start, you might change the feeds or the output of that stream. So we're here now, we will be circular and that is one of our primary goals is to have these things fully circular. And that's quite important from a, I'm a cost point of view for our product pricing price points.

It's important for our customers. You know, we've validated this with over, over 60 customers now globally, uh, small and large international corporates. And sustainability is a very core theme to them. And hitting price, of course, is very important. So we're trying to pair everything to make sure they blend

seamlessly.

The last thing about getting onto a waste feedstock is that, you know, it liberates you from where you produce and manufacture. So the world's supply of sugarcane is, you know, Australia and Brazil and you can get a lot of corn from the U S that's where a lot of these large scale, uh, you know, fermentation tanks I was talking about earlier, I've been stood up and I've been built based on.

Labor costs, energy uses and feedstock supplies is actually one of the most important things. So there is a strong argument to have an adaptable feedstock with an adaptable strain, adaptable feedstock by, I don't mean a waste feedstock. And then in a, in a, in a future world. We're aiming for is you take the waste of a city, the biological waste of a city, and you feed that back through the system to make the products to them and make the future waste of the city.

And you keep going around, of course, in this circular analogy.

And did you mention like in terms of Unilever and others, like the next question I have is about regulation. So obviously. I'm hoping that consumers seeing the problems and making better choices is possible, though they're probably not going to pay, yeah, 10, 20 percent more, let alone double.

So, you know, regulation has been massively increasing with, uh, at least reporting and then some penalties or in rewards for better behavior. Uh, that seems to be really hitting this year. So in terms of the timing of, of the getting better and better and getting to scale. And the problem is getting worse, so people are more likely to act on it.

But the regulation, how quickly is that driving up your value because you're a better alternative? Uh, do you have a line of sight to that or is that, do you think that's still a year or two away?

Yeah, so I can speak, I can of course only speak to things that I'm aware of and that I've been able to consume in this space.

There's two things, uh, well there's a couple of things, but in, when we're talking about Palm oil, uh, which is, you know, our first phase, our first step of sustainable, a sustainable campaign. It's, you know, if you've read some books, it's, it's our moonshot. Um, we have, we also ideally blow out well beyond just palm oil, but when it comes to palm oil, there's something called the EDUR.

Uh, which is a, a European regulatory body, uh, pushing forward to essentially ban the use of unsustainable palm oil from, it was actually supposed to be, I believe, January of 2024, or maybe even 2025. That was given a big buffer. It was notified to Europe, to a lot of the corporates, it was given, you know, quite a long buffer and a lead time.

And I think, I believe last year they were getting close to it and they just said, no, we can't, we need another year. Right. Or maybe it was even two years ago and they said we need another two years. Yeah, yeah. Um, so there are big, serious regulatory Mechanisms happening in places like Europe, which are in other parts of the world following suit based on end user pressures.

And we are going to ride those tailwinds, uh, immensely. We have other internal, uh, when it's people like Unilever, for example, but a lot of these corporates, they have their own internal ESG goals that were set down in their own, you know, in their board meetings, but also heavily influenced by the UN goals.

They're pulling through as well. There are tailwinds there. We've been talking with some of these customers who are actively pursuing next generation technologies a decade before they know they need them to pull these things forward. So we're in a really, really fortunate space to speak to what you're saying around, um, like, I don't think I've come across one customer that's used palm oil and that said, Oh, I don't want to use it.

I don't want to use a sustainable stock if you can meet the price point. That's right. Like I've never, I have not come across that. Um, we've been definitely pulled the difficulty we've been hitting is that you're coming back again to 50 percent of supermarket products, 70 percent of cosmetics, it's just because of this versatility of the oil function from a margarine to a shampoo, with a few changes.

Our difficulty has actually been what product do we target? So we've spent over a year with customers now to the point where We know exactly what two culprits want, and that's exactly what we're keeping it almost like, or blinders, I believe they call you put on a racehorse. We've kept those on to be laser focused to deliver on two variations of this molecule, which is.

Excuse any scientists or chemical, just out there, but it's extremely, extremely precise.

That's amazing. So 50 percent of all products, 70 percent of cosmetics, like that's such, there's such big numbers and what you've got, you've got total inertia, right? You've got, they're so used to it as you said, they, it just works now.

Um, and they, they're probably not sitting there. They're not walking into the jungle and seeing the orangutans and seeing the impact. So this is the issue is like this, this mass organizations and the end consumer, it doesn't like you, you're so removed from the problem, but I think that the, you, that combination now, that problem and how it was done in the sky, we're going, it's gone too far, the regulation really driving it and pushing for change.

And then now it's a matter of actually, as you said, it's not going to be like. Okay. Tomorrow we're going to go to how many millions of tons did you say? Um,

70 million, 70 million tons.

Like it's not cool. Let's let's just switch tomorrow from 70 million tons of non sustainable to sustainable. Great. Well done.

Like it's going to be a messy 10 years, um, for describing all of this. And it's the people using different ways, but it's like. Um, it's going to be gradually and then suddenly, you know, it's going to be like, look, I think we're still in the gradually phase because it's like, you're, you're getting it out there, getting it working, testing with different products, making sure it really works, increasing scale, getting the fermentation side, right.

And the regulation and the companies totally agreeing. Every corporate I'm speaking to is saying, we, we, we need to be acting now in order to not be in a lot of trouble by 2030. So even though it seems 2030 seems like a long way away, it's only five years. And to change the whole world's supply chains to make sure your chocolate still tastes great.

Everyone needs to be really active now. So that's, that's why you're getting so much inbound customer inquiries and demand. And why investors want to invest in the product is because there's a clear path to just revenue of a good product. Um, and that's, what's really exciting. I think that, that combination, um, on that basis, like we're here in 2025, like.

How far can you go on that journey this year?

As far as we can. Yeah, sure. So our goal is yet we've lined up our first customers and our goal is to deliver on our promise of getting them out our samples. Okay. Um, and you know, meeting that product spec. So the key thing here is not just giving them rubbish, but giving them high-quality samples of our oil.

Yeah,

so

LCA for those people that may not know.

Yeah, so LCA is a life cycle analysis and essentially just think of it as like a metric that can be accurately put on. Put on something to say, oh, how sustainable is it?

Yeah, you know, what is the energy use, water use, uh, all the other metrics that go into it, you know, cost of feedstock or even what we're feeding our yeast in our example. W what's, what's the impact of that, the amount of, the impact of that, of that feedstock? Is it waste? Is it not waste? Is it net zero? Is it you all?

Where does it all sit? Yeah. Um, we've actually had some of our peers, uh, over in the US and over in, in Europe. Demonstrate with their demo facilities and 90 percent LCA, uh, reduction or benefits, sustainability benefit in their equivalents of their methods of doing a very different but similar process to liver, you know, in terms of LCA numbers and changes.

That is ridiculously massive.

You know,

if you'll, you'll usually aim for maybe a 10 percent better sustainability output, not a 90 percent better output. And that really comes from unfortunately the harm that is done to make palm oil. Um, Burning a rainforest, bulldozers ripping up, you know, mining is also usually mixed in with timber and palm plantations, all of that.

Yeah. Whereas the footprint and the numbers that we can, we can point output are so much less water, so much less power. Yeah. So much less. And land and environmental footprint physically. 'cause we can produce, uh, hectares. You know, we, we could take, you know. I can't remember the number exactly, I only did it the other week, but, you know, we're talking about digging 10 hectares of land, uh, and compressing it to one square foot of land to make the same amount of oil.

So that type of ratio is quite, quite important.

Yeah. I think that's, that's what's really exciting and what I love about working in climate solutions is. Once you actually stop trying to avoid the negative and just say either deny it's happening and the problem like, and I think most of the world agrees that we know the problem and you actually try to take the positive, the delta between the absolute negative and the positive can be absolutely huge.

And this is a great example because as you said. Deforestation, lots of biodiversity, like, um, so many negatives of the current process and the, and the new process, it doesn't even have to be like absolutely miracle, but this one is, this is actually just so much better. And I think that's why it's going to go gradually then suddenly is because I think the really key tipping point we have to get to in climate solutions is.

Not when the green premium is palatable for, by most customers, but where there's a green profit where it's like, this is the regulation has made it fair. And I think absolutely that's good. That's ratcheting up and ratcheting up every year from, from right now, that is absolutely ratcheting up and the technology is also ratcheting, ratcheting up.

So it's like. Oh, we really, really need an alternative. Look at what's liver's done. He's a great alternative. It's like it really, really works. It's massively better for the environment. It's cost-effective. Like, like we're getting to the point where that is absolutely massively green profitable. So very, very excited.

Um, um, really quickly. Um, I just got to have a tour of the facilities here. There's an incredible lab here at Macquarie University. Can you give us this, the, the, um, uh, well we might be able to share some photos, but can you give us the one, one minute? It's a, it's a, it's an Australian led bio lab, one of the best in the Southern Hemisphere.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah. So we're very, very lucky. Uh, our staff, Le Ver and our team, we get to use some of the best state of the art. Lab equipment and facilities here. Uh, I, I personally would say, yeah, in this other hemisphere, it's, it's ridiculous. The amount of access to equipment that we have to play with, which advances the biology.

And we're very fortunate to work with groups like the Australian research council center excellence in biology, uh, the Australian genome foundry, uh, linked into that is the, um, bio platforms, Australia, the national reconstruction fund, uh, investment New South Wales, you know, a lot of individuals as well as Macquarie.

Individuals and organizations have come together and the Synthetic Biology Center of Excellence is actually larger than just Macquarie. Macquarie is the hub where things are organized and a lot of the work is done, but it is a large group of, I believe, about 11 different institutions. I could be wrong on that.

We're really lucky. But, um, you know, what I'd like to maybe end on then is actually what it enables companies like Levert to tap into. Yep. So, you know, this very expensive, you know, sometimes million dollar pieces of equipment, uh, that we get to access. Let's just ask brave new questions. So earlier on in this chat, you asked, well, you know, there's, there's price tolerances to just be sustainable.

You haven't, there's maybe 15 percent tolerance if you're a sustainable product or, um, you know, you've got these other metric. Well. What, uh, what we've realized with customers is you've got to hit the nail on the head with maybe five different value props to get that momentum going beyond just sustainability.

Of course, it's going to be price this facility and this equipment and the technology that we are building on lets us ask the brave new questions of. And the past question of why do we take plant oils seeds and then put them on our face or in our body and expect them to be perfectly compatible or the best product for us?

Sure.

There's a lot of work. A lot of smart people have to do to take things to work for humans. A lot of formulations, a lot of, a lot of nutraceutical products, cosmetics, and foods. We're asking the brave new questions as we build out this palm oil equivalent, but we're also looking forward. What are things that you can't get in the supply chain?

What are things that you. You don't need to take down 10, you know, 10 hectares of rainforest to squeeze out that particularly valuable molecule that you'll get two grams of or destroy the Amazon for a certain molecule. What if you can actually design for humans, uh, by humans? Yeah. That's what we're aiming for.

Fantastic.

Look, it's so good. And you see the problem here, 50 percent of products in the supermarket, 70 percent of cosmetics, um, and we're not talking about dropping those, we're talking about just change the way we make them. Um, and there's an incredible opportunity here and fantastic to see the momentum.

Wonderful to be a part of it as someone who's doing my master's of sustainable development here at Macquarie Uni. Great to drop in and see the lab. Very impressive. Um, they won't let me touch it or play with it, but, uh, it's great to see that, um, Tom and the team are doing such good work. Um, Tom, congratulations on the progress.

I'm looking forward to an amazing year and thanks for sharing with everybody. And, um, yeah, we'll have to catch up with those later in the year when you make some more progress. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Mick. Thanks, mate. Bye everyone. Bye.