Catch up with Ben Wilding, CEO of Sun Bear Biofuture, a biotech startup developing fermentation based alternatives to cocoa butter and palm oil. Learn how they have grown through the Carbon13 Venture Builder while tackling challenges, building traction and preparing to scale.
So Ben, what’s going on in the Sun Bear Biofuture world?
Last year I spent about 18 months trying to raise a seed round, which was tiresome. So, what we did was reassess where we have been knocked back when attempting to raise consistently across multiple VCs.
If there’s a silver lining to busting a gut for 18 months and literally reaching out to hundreds of VCs and speaking with probably a couple of hundreds, it’s that it forces you to consistently reevaluate your priorities and how you’ll approach something.
We said, OK, what are the absolute bare bones we could raise to validate those things over a 12-month period, then we can go back to the market once we’ve got more of those ducks in a row.
So, we did that. As part of that, we are building a pilot plant, which costs us less than 20,000 pounds, which will be a 300-litre facility based at Oxford Brookes University, where we are now.
One piece of the puzzle is how do you do this with low capex because that’s a big blocker for scaling biotech. The other piece of the puzzle was more firmed up customer engagement, like some actual paid invoices going well beyond LOIs.
Luckily, we’ve got LOIs falling out of our ears. Now people want offtake agreements. We will be utilising the pilot plant to finally cross that chasm of lab scale production to address the backlog of people that want to work with us and take samples.
That will really unlock a value inflection point towards the end of this year where we’ve shown that there’s a market willing to pay invoices and our ability to produce this with low capex.
You mentioned the volume of LOIs is very high, what is making potential customers excited about your product?
We’ve concentrated efforts on a new yeast strain that would produce a cocoa butter alternative.
Over about an 18-month period, the price of cocoa butter went from about 6 to 8 pounds per kilogram up to about 35 pounds per kilogram. So, everyone was chasing alternatives.
And for context for you, you may have read a BBC article about why penguin chocolate biscuits aren’t chocolate anymore. That is the impact of that cocoa price escalating dramatically.
There’s been quite a few articles around that. And that’s really got people excited.
And surely the current geopolitics is going to have a knock-on effect on cacao?
Our value-add pitch is about de-risking new regulations as they come in. So, you’ve got things like European Union deforestation regulations, which have just commenced for large companies.
That means that if deforestation or employment law issues like child slavery, is anywhere in your supply chain, whether you control that element of the supply chain or not, you can face fines of up to 4% of turnover. So, we de-risk regulatory threats that are increasing.
The UK also imports 100% of its cocoa butter. So, there’s a kind of food security angle as well. That normally applies more if we’re talking to a minister or an MP.
Our techno-economic modelling and carbon case study assessment also has land use around 90 to 95 percent less than palm oil or cocoa butter farming and CO2e at approximately 95% of the carbon emissions from traditional approaches.
What would be your answer to how you’re seeing 2026 as a food tech company?
What has impacted us is the repercussions of huge promises in the alternative protein space over the past couple of decades, which hasn’t filtered through to investors’ pockets. Meaning that agri-food tech generally, I think, is suffering significantly in terms of the amount of investment going into it as a space.
And that’s part of the repercussions that we’ve seen over the past 18 months of trying to raise that funding.
You have to recognise that you’re on a roller coaster ride, you’re going to be at the bottom of a very big dip. But then inevitably, you kind of latch on to that little cog, and it pulls you back up to the top.
When and how that happens is largely out of your control. But what you can control is your cash flow, your engagement with customers, keeping investors in the loop that you want to invest in you in the future, and just knuckling down and really focusing on the value add, which is proving the low CapEx pilot plant and the customer engagement piece.
And then going back when hopefully the ecosystem in which you are situated has thawed a little and maybe your life gets a little bit easier.
If you were talking to the next cohort of Carbon 13 startups, do you have any words of advice for them?
Put your padding on and your gum shield in. Get ready.
It’s not about trying to tick a box, jump over a bar, or pass an exam.
No, no, this is a competition, and people need to understand the fight so that they can actually be serious about and really focus.
Money used to flow with a really polished good pitch deck and maybe a good founder team. Now you really need to understand your numbers. You’ve got to understand how that scales tangibly and what your roadmap is to achieve that.
And you also have to have that backed up by that serious engagement. So double down on all the efforts around that. You know, if you were having one online call with a potential customer, you could get an LOI signed relatively easily. That’s not enough. Prior to that, drill into how much of these things are they purchasing each year? What would they be prepared to pay potentially? You’ve got to like to get into the depths of that.
And that’s not as easy because you then have to spend a bit more time building that relationship with that potential customer and go beyond that kind of scratching the surface kind of conversation and just push it as far as you possibly can. And don’t be surprised if that’s not enough.
And then you’ve just got to keep grinding.
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