Founders Highlight Series - Nick Stamatiou

For this month’s Founders Series, we interviewed Nick Stamatiou, Founder of Whole Green Foods.

Whole Green Foods has created a proprietary technology that enables cost-effective and large-scale production of plant-based products, using produce that would otherwise be wasted, while maintaining the nutritional value of the original ingredients.

Food scraps are generally wasted across the board when they have the potential to be harnessed into useful products. It processes all parts of food waste without chemical intervention, producing nutritional and cost-effective products. During our discussion with Nick, we looked into the commercialisation opportunities and what initially fuelled his passion for this venture. 

Tell us a bit about your background and how you and your team started up Whole Green Foods.

For most of my career, I’ve been a leading intellectual property strategy and tech commercialisation expert with over 15 years of experience working with global tech businesses.  I’m an experienced patent and trademarks attorney, litigator, and commercialisation advisor that has represented multinational companies like Boeing, AT&T, BHP, Bosch, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Before starting my own Seattle-based consulting firm, Radian Global, I built and ran the IP Strategy and Commercialisation team for Deloitte across the Asia Pacific region and have been recognised for five consecutive years now as one of the top 300 IP strategists in the world.

In around 2018, while still at Deloitte, I had the good fortune of meeting Cedric Cross, my technical co-founder, who shared with me his vision for enhancing nutrition and eliminating waste by eating ‘whole’ foods. With over a third of the food produced in the world never being consumed, this immediately struck me as a cause worth pursuing. While just an idea at the time, Cedric and I began to build a proof-of-concept device that would go on to become the WINX™ processing technology that we have today. Joining us a little later down the track was Ivan Gustavino, a globally-recognised tech entrepreneur with successful exits to groups like Dassault Systemes, and an experienced M&A practitioner that has worked with many global tech and VC groups on a range of transactions. Ivan brings immense commercial and strategic experience to the business, as well as the governance practice he has accumulated as a board member of numerous ASX-listed technology companies. Together as founders, we make a formidable team with a wealth of experience and complementary skillsets that will see us succeed on the global stage.

Whole Green Foods

Co-Founders Nick Stamatiou and Cedric Cross at their nutrition lab in Perth, Western Australia. Photography by Fox and Wildling

How does the WINXTM technology work and what are the overarching goals of what it intends to do?

It’s absurd to think that one-third of the food produced in the world is never consumed, but when you look at food production for the last 200 years it’s easy to see just how much waste is created in the manufacturing of everyday products – whether it be raw produce, energy, water, or even nutrition.

It starts with ingredient manufacturers, who take wholesome raw inputs and use huge amounts of energy and water to create specialised and highly processed ingredients, only to pass them on to food manufacturers who recombine them to make the foods we like to eat. This didn’t make sense to us, so we’ve developed a unique processing technology that eliminates waste by using the entire input to create highly functional ingredients and flavours. We call this technology WINX™ – our Whole Ingredient Nutrient Extraction process. 

WINX is an in-line processing technology that delivers a new class of whole-food ingredient and changes the way we think about food production. For ingredient manufacturers, it enables them to create highly functional whole food ingredients, which significantly reduces waste and energy use. For food manufacturers, the tech enables a wide range of genuine label claims for plant-based foods, from zero waste, to enhanced bioactive benefits and nutrition. 

With consumers increasingly demanding clean labels and supply-chain transparency, the WINX™ technology is also addressing an emerging supply-chain bottleneck for healthy ingredients. With around 25% of produce never leaving the farm, our early focus is on the upstream waste that occurs between farms and ingredient manufacturers. Within this segment, we are targeting fruit and vegetables, and cereals and legumes, as the high-value waste areas in this growing ‘products from waste’s market.

What makes it stand out in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness?

In competitive terms, the outputs generated using the WINX technology are unique. While most competitor businesses are focused on the production of protein or fibre isolate products, which require intensive chemical processing, the WINX advantage is embedded in the ability of the technology to simply and efficiently process the ‘whole’ ingredient. This simplification of the process not only yields higher quality and more nutritional outputs but significantly reduces both the capital and operational expenditure involved in the food/ingredient manufacturing process. Additionally, the process itself produces an output product that is highly versatile and functional, which drastically reduces the requirement for additional processing steps. Most importantly, the process eliminates waste (as well as costs associated with the disposal of that waste) by converting it into a soluble fibre that forms an integral part of the output product.

In summary, the WINX technology enables food/ingredient manufacturers to considerably improve the cost-effectiveness of their production operations by eliminating waste and capturing a much higher proportion of the input ingredient. In financial terms, these food/ingredient manufacturers realise direct savings from reduced capital and operating expenditures and indirect savings associated with the elimination of waste and improvements in ingredient-to-product utilisation. Additionally, unlike other food processing systems, the WINX technology has been designed in a modular manner to enable incremental growth of operations over time.

Similarly, primary producers (i.e., growers) are able to realise significant returns on investment using the WINX technology. The ability to valorise waste produce (e.g. grade 2-3 produce) or low-value crops using the technology has the potential to substantially improve the profitability of growers and to provide them with new motivation to invest in the production of plant-based ingredients that are of higher value to downstream food/ingredient manufacturers.

Can you tell us a bit about your expansion and impact?

In early 2021, we completed a very heavily oversubscribed pre-seed capital raising of around AUD$500,000, which enabled the business to commission a small-scale R&D facility in WA with a production capacity of about 15,000 L a day.

Early in 2022, we began undertaking paid trials of our technology – focusing primarily on waste upcycling applications for a range of fruit, vegetables, legumes, and cereal inputs.

We are currently collaborating with the CSIRO to conduct a range of nutritional studies on our ingredients, and we have two major Australian universities engaging with us on research projects relating to eliminating allergens in cereal and legume products. In addition, we have significant interest from a number of food and ingredient manufacturers across Australia and South-East Asia, and we are accelerating negotiations in relation to the commercialisation of our clean-label functional oat product – which can be used as the base for a wide range of plant-based dairy alternative products. 

We recently completed our seed capital raise, securing Artesian and the GRDC (through its GrainInnovate fund) as our cornerstone investors and enabling us to begin planning our expansion into South-East Asia. In addition, we have also been recognised as a Top 20 global company in the global Entrepreneurship World Cup, a Top 500 foodtech company in the Future Food 500, a finalist in the WA Innovator of the Year Awards 2021, an Australian finalist in the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), a cohort member in the inaugural Rocket Seeder Food Waste + Loss Program, a cohort member in the HARVEST Agtech accelerator program, and a cohort member in the inaugural X-Protein Labs Program in the Peel Food Innovation Precinct.

You've been attracting a lot of global interest and key partnerships, can you tell us what is next for Whole Green Foods?

Even though we’re about 5 years into the business so far, we’re just getting started. We have a massive interest in our functional oat product due to its ability to reduce costs, eliminate waste, and create more ‘clean label’ products. This has given us a very focused commercialisation objective in the short term, and we are currently working with some very large groups, like Kerry, to discuss how we bring this to market as a product.

With our primary focus being nutrition, we are already beginning to expand the team to support our vision to deliver the best quality nutrition – and to improve the health and well-being of the downstream consumers that eat our products. This has also led us to extend our research relationships, and we currently have active projects with the University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University, Macquarie University, and the CSIRO.

In terms of our technology applications, we have already started work on combination products, for example, combinations with oats to deliver a better standard of holistic nutrition. Separate from that, we are working with a range of groups on waste valorisation applications, including the use of our WINX technology for the extraction and isolation of valuable bioactive compounds. We expect that this work will also lead to the establishment of 1-2 additional WINX processing facilities by the end of 2023 – including our first in South East Asia.