Tomorrow’s Table: Agronomics

While IPO activity in the UK remains muted, PE deals are still thriving and Agronomics is positioned well in its niche.

By:

Ape Hopium Team

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Agronomics (ANIC: LSE) is an interesting company.

One thing that must be outlined is that although the UK market is seeing less IPOs, what the market is seeing, is a steady rate of Private Equity (PE) deals. These PE deals are the sole bread and butter of firms such as Agronomics.

Agronomics includes a variation of at least 20 different companies under its investment umbrella. This includes;

  • Liberation Labs: a contract manufacturer for precision fermentation. Agronomics co-founded Liberation Labs in June 2022 and the company is now building its first 600,000L facility in Richmond Indiana.
  • SuperMeat: mission is to bring the world the highest quality chicken meat, grown directly from cells, in a sustainable and animal-friendly process. Many have been able to try SuperMeat’s chicken burger at its Israel based concept restaurant, ‘The Chicken’.
  • BlueNalu: is a cultivated seafood company specialising in creating cell-based seafood products from fish cells. Their goal is to provide a sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional fishing and aquaculture practices while also meeting the growing demand for seafood. The initial product focus is bluefin tuna, a high value and endangered species of fish.
  • Meatable: is a Dutch cultivated meat company focused initially on pork and beef. They have an exclusive licence to the Opti-Ox technology to develop food, allowing them to generate large amounts of muscle and fat tissue at lower cost than many competitors.
  • Formo: produces animal-free dairy products through their precision fermentation platform. They have a strong focus on product development, with expertise in creating delicious cheeses, as well as an egg protein replacement which can be readily scaled for nearer-term revenues.
  • All G Foods: produces next generation animal-free dairy using precision fermentation. All G Foods’ world-leading expertise in producing casein proteins allows them to replicate the functionality of the dairy products we love, without the cow.
  • Geltor: is a precision fermentation company that has developed a high-performance E.coli platform capable of secreting large amounts of protein. Geltor’s initial products on the market are bio-designed collagen and elastin peptides for use in cosmetics.
  • Clean Food Group: has a proprietary yeast platform developed at the University of Bath over 7 years by CSO Chris Chuck. This platform enables them to produce sustainable palm oil alternatives, one of the key global drivers of deforestation.
  • EVERY: creates egg proteins through precision fermentation for use as functional ingredients, without the animal.
  • Onego Bio: produces egg proteins with the Trichoderma fungal platform developed at the VTT. This is the same strain used by the leader in precision fermentation dairy, allowing Onego to fast-track its path to commercialisation and achieve protein titres superior to its competitors.
  • Solar Foods: developed a novel process for producing a protein-rich food ingredient called Solein. The process involves converting carbon dioxide and electricity into a nutritious, single-cell protein using a natural process used by ‘hydrogenotrophs’.
  • Meatly: aims to become the first cultivated meat company to commercialise in the UK by focusing on pet food, which has lower regulatory barriers than cultivated meat for humans.
  • LiveKindly: is one of the largest plant-based meat companies in the world, having acquired leading brands such as The Fry Family Food Co., LikeMeat, and Oumph!
  • Mosa Meat: is one of the leading cultivated meat companies in Europe, focused initially on beef. They are using non-immortalised, non GMO cell lines which they believe is the only approach that will be accepted by European regulators, giving them unparalleled access to this market.
  • Galy’s: produces cotton using its plant cell culture platform without the need for the crop. This method alleviates some of the environmental concerns around cotton production such as high pesticide use and high water inputs. They are expanding the platform to include other products such as
  • Tropic: is a gene editing company developing seeds for tropical crops with improved commercial characteristics such as improved yield or resistance to drought, or disease.
  • California Cultured: is a plant cell culture company focused on producing cocoa and coffee without the crops. It is thought this will alleviate concerns around the chocolate industry such as deforestation and the exploitation of child labour.
  • Hydgene: engineers microorganisms using synthetic biology to act as a proprietary biocatalyst for the production of green hydrogen. This technology offers a unique solution through its cost effective production of green hydrogen using waste biomass.
  • Bond Per Foods: brew scalable, sustainable, and nutritious animal proteins using precision fermentation, targeted for pet food applications.
  • Rebellyous Foods: produces plant-based chicken and is developing new production systems to decrease cost of production, with the goal of enabling plant-based meat to reach cost parity.
  • Wild Microbes: is aiming to domesticate some of the nearly 1 trillion micro-organisms in the world for use in precision fermentation. The majority of synthetic biology companies depend on a small handful of legacy organisms, and Wild Microbes intends to develop a catalogue of next generation strains to out-perform these and drive cost-reductions across the board.

Agronomics’ Director Share Trading

In February, Director Jim Mellon purchased a significant number of shares. This is always a good sign, giving the market confidence in the ability of the company to do better in the future.

Agronomics Price Target

Agronomics has a price target of 0.1490 GBP, according to one analyst.

Seeing as how we all may end up eating bugs in the not-to-distant future, it is an interesting company to watch.

It is trading at a significant discount to NAV (currently its NAV is 14.4 pence per share). Today, the share price is trading at just 7.46 pence. Its ATH was registered at 41.5p in May 2021. Although it could take some time for it to be going back up to those highs, as those high were at a period of mania and concern for supply lines. But it did give investors a look into the possibility.

The appeal of agronomics is that it is a broad bet on the industry as a whole. This is unlike investing in Beyond Meat or another company which is a straight play on those firms.

The Speculatour’s Disclosure: Not financial advice. No guidance is provided for any particular investor, asset prices can fall as well as rise. The Speculatour is not a licensed securities dealer, broker, investment bank or advisor.