Unwrapping the plastics stranglehold
Small Steps Vol. 67: Our impact thesis for Great Wrap ♻️; reversing health inequalities🧑🏾⚕️; and seeing cultivated ragu on the menu🧑🏻🍳.
“Happiness comes not from what you're looking at, but from what you choose to see. See it, be it, live it where you are, doing what you're doing, in the world as it is.”
— Ralph Marston, Football player
Kick start
♻️If you’re like us, you might be feeling a bit blue about all the soft plastic you’ve “recycled” after hearing this month’s news about the collapse of RedCycle (context in last Small Steps). Thankfully, there’s one company helping us feel green - namely, Great Wrap.
They’re a bioplastic cling wrap brand that’s unwrapping the petrochemical stranglehold on the industry. And their product composts in 90 days so no recycling necessary! Check out our impact thesis below on the company below.
What we’re thinking about
🧑🏾⚕️ Tech wave to health equity. One major challenge for health equity is that medical solutions have historically been developed for the archetypal privileged population and aren’t optimised for other groups. For example, pulse oximeters, a nearly ubiquitous device in clinics used to measure blood oxygen, perform much worse for people with dark skin leading to poorer health outcomes for pregnant mothers or COVID-19 sufferers of colour. We see these disparities as opportunity for high impact tech, such as this development of a pulse oximeter that uses LEDs to account for skin tone.
In other positive news for health equity advancements, service for the specific needs of women is continuing to accelerate, with Maven raising $90m to expand clinical services for women and families after growing 5x over the last year. This piles on top of explosive growth in Femtech, which attracted $2.5b in funding in 2021, up from $0.5b five years earlier.
🐔 New ground for the cultivated meats menu. The FDA has deemed lab grown chicken safe for consumption in a landmark move that paves the way for the more than 100 cultivated meat startups globally making low emissions, clean proteins. Previously, the only place you could buy lab grown chicken nugs was Singapore, who approved Eat Just’s products in late 2020. It’s exciting impact news because lab grown meats are one potential lever for fixing agriculture, which accounts for almost a quarter of global CO2e emissions and is a problem area for disease.
So when are you going to see “cultivated ragu” on your menu? For the explorative eater there’s likely to be a wave of taste test opportunities over the next year, with Australian startup Vow recently raising $73m to launch lab grown quail for specialty Singaporean diners in 2023.
However, there’s still a substantial cost gap that needs to be closed before any lab grown brands end up on supermarket shelves and experts think a decade is the likely timeframe. Eat Just was still losing money on its $23 chicken nuggets in 2021 and one review of costs suggests that even in the most optimistic scenarios, lab grown meat will only ever be a niche, premium product. We’re slightly more optimistic, and are looking for the wave of startups developing technology solutions to bring down the cost curve.
New paths
🩺 Perx Health is on the hunt for an Enrolment Marketing Associate.
👨🏽⚕️Seer is searching for a Information Security Manager.
📦Sendle is seeking a Staff Accountant.
🧻Who Gives A Crap is after a UK-based Marketing Manager.
🔥 Also, check out our Giant Leap Fund jobs board for over 80+ available positions or fill out our expression of interest form. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Giant leaps
♻️ Great Wrap has been featured on the second season of Zac Effron’s new series Down To Earth. It’s Episode 8, Season 2, check it out!
🎉 Our Investment Manager, Charlie, has been nominated for Climate Salad’s Climate Tech Investor of 2022 Award for investors going above and beyond to support climate tech.
For the road
🌎 COP-out? COP27 has come and gone from the headlines, but what actually happened? Time Mag has put together a handy wrap of the event. It largely tells us what we already know: Countries are frozen when it comes to setting clear mitigation targets, and the 1.5c target is in jeopardy.
🧨 The tweet that cost $15 billion. Elon Musk opened the floodgates to paid account verification on Twitter and one user created a fake account for Eli Lilly, a producer of the diabetes drug insulin, saying that it was now free. Stocks in the company free-fell as a result.
🔬When science and startups meet. Biotech and deep tech incubator Cicada Innovations is launching in Melbourne. We’re excited to see what new discoveries and innovations will come as a result of this expansion.
🍄 Peak mushroom. Companies around the world pioneering products using compounds found in mushrooms as a meat alternative have come together to form the Fungi Protein Association. The peak body will represent the interests of the growing industry, and lobby for policy change that will support the sector’s growth.
🤖 Can this robot clean up its act? A joke-telling vacuum-bot at Darent Valley Hospital in the UK has been put on notice after staff accused it of being both rude to passers by and terrible at its job. One staff member pointed out its so bad that they have to “follow it around with a hoover”
⚽ A truly Australian moment at the FIFA world cup. We’ll let you sound this one out.
💌 Sharing is caring. If you don’t like party rounds, this ain’t for you.