In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 65: Agronomics
In this episode, I sit down with Jim Mellon, the billionaire entrepreneur and Executive Director of Agronomics, a leading listed company in the field of cellular agriculture. Jim provides a candid, no-holds-barred post-mortem on the recent collapses of industry darlings Believer Meats and Meatable, attributing their downfall to gross overspending and “over-speced” facilities. He contrasts this with his current “frugal” playbook, revealing how portfolio company Clean Food Group acquired a fully functional production facility in Liverpool for just £1M—a fraction of the cost of new builds.
Jim also breaks down his aggressive expansion into the Middle East, detailing the specific energy advantages and 50% government subsidies that make the UAE the next logical hub for fermentation. Listen to the full episode to hear Jim’s forecast for the next 12 months and why he believes “stainless steel lasts forever.”
Key Facts Agronomics Limited:
- Goal: To invest in “Clean Food” (Cellular Agriculture and Precision Fermentation) with a focus on IP ownership and asset-light or distressed-asset models.
- Milestone: Portfolio company Clean Food Group recently acquired a production facility for £1M and is set to produce thousands of tons of oil next year; Meatly received approval for pet food in the UK.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- The “Frugal” Playbook: Buying Distressed Assets. The era of building greenfield mega-facilities is over. Jim’s winning strategy involves identifying distressed industrial assets and repurposing them. By buying a facility in Liverpool for £1M (essentially the cost of scrap) rather than building new, the cost of capital drops from ~25% of turnover to 4%. ”We recognized that stainless steel lasts forever. So if you can acquire stainless steel that’s maybe been in production for 50 years and refurbish it, it’s a lot cheaper than getting it made in China… We paid 1 million pounds for that… It means that the capital cost of carry for that company… is 4% of turnover.”
- Why the Giants Fell: Over-Specing and Over-Valuation. Jim offers a blunt assessment of why Believer Meats and Meatable entered administration. It wasn’t just the market downturn; it was an internal failure to manage cash burn and an obsession with building “state-of-the-art” facilities that the unit economics couldn’t support yet. “The symptomatic problem of the companies that have gone bad for investors have been overspending and overvaluation… Believer Meats… built a state-of-the-art facility in North Carolina which was over specced, frankly. And Meatable was also, in my opinion, overspending… leases of 1.6 million euros a year… high wages. Lots of unnecessary activities.”
- What “Good” Looks Like: Frugal + Opportunistic + Controlled IP + Near Market. Jim gives a clear success checklist: founders who spend carefully, own the critical tech, and can sell something in the near term — not a decade out. “ So what we’re looking for is companies that have a frugal mindset, have an opportunistic mindset, that have IP that is absolutely within their control, and that have an identifiable market that’s not so far away. We can actually see them selling products quite quickly.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
