A Chinese packaging business has joined in Lever VC in the role of both a limited partner and a general partner, lending its China market resources to this international venture fund that has made around a dozen investments across the world.
The fund was co-founded by Nick Cooney, former founder of New Crop Capital and Good Food Institute, and Lawrence Chu, who owns Venture Smart and some other companies under the umbrella company of Black Pine, in 2018. Both were early investors in Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats, JUST, Aleph Farms, Kite Hill and other leading plant-based and cultivated meat and dairy companies. Lawrence Chu has also deployed over US$450 million in private equity investments in conventional animal protein companies.
Among Lever VC’s portfolio are:
Turtle Tree Labs, the first company in the world developing cow's milk and human breast milk from cell cultivation;
Better Meat Co, whose plant-based meat protein blend is featured in Perdue Farms products at over 7,000 grocery stores across the U.S.;
Good Planet Foods, a top plant-based cheese player with distribution at Walmart, Albertsons, Kroger, Costco, White Castle and others;
Avant, the leading cell-cultivated meat company in the greater China region;
The Good Spoon, a fast-growing plant-based condiments brand with distribution at several of Europe's largest retailers;
Bond Pet Foods, the first company in the world focused on producing real meat protein from fermentation. Lever VC leverages its own proprietary database to track 1,200 alternative protein companies globally.
"We decided to invest in alternative protein in mid-2018, and we started approaching a few VCs that make investment in this field in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Mainland," said Benny Pei, Lever VC Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Lever VC's General Partner DFP Capital, and eventually decided to invest in Lever VC and become its shareholder.
DFP Capital has its roots that can be traced back to the early 1980s when it acquired a loss-making state-owned packaging manufacturer and turned it around quickly, and listed the company (SH: 601515) in Shanghai in 2012. In 2016 DFP Capital partnered with Tiantu Capital to establish a jointly managed fund which has invested in more than 20 deals domestically, which include Nayuki, a chain tea-house and bakery chain with some 400 outlets, and Pagoda, a retail chain of fresh fruits with some 4,000 outlets now gearing for an IPO.
Independently DFP Capital, which is based in Hong Kong, acquired a dairy farm and a dairy processor in 2016, and introduced the Nepean River Dairy brand in China, which, available in deluxe hypermarkets such as Ole, and Alibaba's Fresh Hema, has gained increasing market share in the premium dairy market in East China.
Pei said that DFP Capital will provide on the ground support to Lever VC's portfolio companies when they are ready to tap into the massive Chinese market, by sharing its operational, marketing and branding know-how pertaining to the Chinese market with them to accelerate their pace of commercialization.
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