Mere Mortals

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 An insightful conversation with Michael Fox, CEO of Fable Food Company. We explore the journey and innovative approach of Fable Food in creating meat alternatives from mushrooms. Michael shares his personal motivations, including health and environmental concerns, that led him to start Fable. We discuss the challenges and successes in the market, consumer behavior, and the intricacies of scaling the business globally. The conversation also touches on the impact of family, personal lifestyle choices, and the exciting future plans as Michael prepares to move to New York to further expand Fable's reach.

00:00 - Consumer Reactions to Fable's Product
00:36 - Welcome and Introduction
01:02 - Starting a Veggie Garden
02:23 - Benefits of Growing Food at Home
03:04 - Michael's Journey to Veganism
05:12 - Founding Fable Food Company
06:52 - Evolution of Meat Alternatives
09:57 - Why Mushrooms?
11:06 - Processing Challenges and Innovations
14:18 - Financial Viability and Fundraising
17:07 - Consumer Insights and Behavior
21:00 - Naming and Menu Placement in Restaurants
26:05 - Importance of Consumer Research
27:29 - Global Market Differences
30:54 - Distribution Challenges in the US
32:01 - Moving to New York
34:34 - Defining Success for Fable
40:13 - Team Culture and Hiring
45:00 - Explaining Fable to Kids
48:07 - Final Thoughts and Contact Information

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[00:00:00] Unknown:

Consumers go into the store,   film themselves   buying the product, film themselves taking home and cooking with it, and it's kinda it was mind blowing. Like, the product   comes in a pack at,   250 gram pack. It's like a yeah. Pulled shiitake mushroom product. It's got a pic had a picture at the time on the front of the product being cooked in a pan. Mhmm. But 20% of consumers when they got home with the products would just open the pack,   just reach in, pick it out, and just start eating it. No way. And we're like Really? We're like, what? Like, didn't even imagine. Like, and then and then they're like, it tastes okay, but I probably wouldn't buy it again. We're like Wow.  

[00:00:36] Unknown:

Michael, welcome back to the Mere Mortals podcast. Now we talked 3 years ago. I think it's only 3 years to date. We had a online conversation. Now we're in person. And And one of the reasons I wanted to do it in person was 2. 1, I'll I'll be looking around for it because we're here. If you're looking at the video, we're also seeing it. But I've been hearing you have a veggie patch. And a veggie patch where you sort of make your own food. So what was the the driver for yourself on the veggie patch and making food at home?  

[00:01:02] Unknown:

Yeah. Good to see you again, Juan, and great great chatting again.   Yeah. I guess I'm a pretty healthy eater, and I've probably probably sort of over the last 20 years sort of gradually   gone to a really kinda quite whole food natural sort of diet. And when we moved into this place,   we actually, my wife, Katrina, and I bought the property and it's got a granny flat. And we had friends,   Matt Weller and,   Ash who   moved into the granny flat when we bought the property, and they,   are also very healthy eaters. And they'd actually worked on a kind of regenerative farm for 12 months. So when we moved in here, they were like, oh, we wanna set up a veggie garden. So I was like, perfect. Like, this would be great. And so I got got kinda got to learn from them. I'd never had a veggie garden myself   before, but it was something I wanted to get into. So, yeah, we kinda built the veggie garden together and got it all going. And, they moved to Canada   about 8, 8 months ago, so then I've sort of taken it over and run it since. And,   yeah, it's been amazing. It's like   such a I've I get so much out of it. Like, it's a very meditative experience going and spending sort of half an hour in the garden every day.  

Then you get to have the whole experience of, like, composting food, creating the soil,   and and improving the soil and seeing firsthand the impact of good quality soil, how how much better the plants grow with that,   and then,   yeah, being able to just grow amazing food. And I just had a salad for lunch today, Went down into the garden, literally picked   6 or 7 different leafy greens, picked some cherry tomatoes,   yeah, cooked up some tofu and had some frozen mushrooms that we've grown in the grown in the garden that that I'd chopped up previously and and had in the freezer. And, yeah, I just got to have this really delicious   lunch with probably more than half, you know, 3 quarters of the stuff in the salad  

[00:02:48] Unknown:

straight from the garden. Now that aspect of so for me and 1, I think I've had a veggie garden for about 3 weeks and we killed everything that was in there, unfortunately, which is which is really sad. But I think looking back at your health history, the real I think you've been vegetarian for, like, 7 or 8 years. You've been vegan for about 3 to 4 years. So there's obviously, a love and care for food that you're just talking about then with having the right food and the like, which   has to be in part why Fable sort of came around and the people that you worked around. And for for those who probably haven't checked out the previous conversation or haven't heard about Fable. Right? You say CEO of Fable Food Company,   how would you tie that? You just just then that you talked about in terms of the love of food as to what Fable is and what got you to going on the path of building Fable Food Company? Yeah. So probably actually going right right back to the start. It's, sort of 20 years ago my dad, was diagnosed with skincare and he and my mom went, to this  

[00:03:41] Unknown:

kinda camp down in Victoria. Apparently, it doesn't exist anymore, but it's called the Gula Foundation ran this, camp for people with,   cancer. And a big part of the course was eating, like, really healthy whole food diets and and, you know, still getting chemotherapy and everything, but also having a kind of giving yourself the best chance of recovering from cancer through, sort of natural   yeah. Through through particularly through diet.   And, unfortunately,   my dad passed away, but the experience that he and mom had at the camp,   they brought back home and started cooking, and we all started eating that way. And that was I was probably about 20 years old at the time.  

And   so I think that that's sort of what started to shift my thinking on diet. And then,   yeah, so starting to eat a lot more healthily and gradually over 20 the next 23 years since then,   that sort of built up and I to the point where I was probably cutting meat back over   a decade and then finally went vegetarian 7 or 8 years ago and then still, yeah, progression cutting dairy and eggs down to going vegan 4 4 or 5 years   ago. And,   yeah. And then it was that along that journey, I'd I'd yeah. I previously had a business shoes of prey, which I think we talked about, last time.   But, yeah, when I finished up with that business,   6 years ago now, took 6 months off thinking about what I wanna do next and got very passionate about wanting to help end industrial animal agriculture for all the same reasons that I'm, vegan.  

And, so you have kind of health environment,   ethics,   pandemic prevention.   And, thinking about the best ways to go about doing that, sort of food is   if you could, yeah, come up with food products that make it easier for people to transition away from meats and make food that's really delicious,   and meat like,   but do it in a really healthy whole food way that kind of aligned with that diet I've been eating for sort of 23 years.   Yeah, really natural ingredients, minimally processed, healthy, whole food based.  

[00:05:37] Unknown:

That would be I figured that might be a good path to helping people reduce their meat consumption, helping end industrial and agriculture.   Yeah. And one aspect of just food in general, stick to the food theme here, is food's also gonna taste good, and it's gonna taste nice, and you wanna be able to have it. Something that we talked about 3 years ago that I found was   produce or products maybe a few years before then, which were essential straight meat alternatives from pea sources or the like, pretty far away from meat, and so taste and the processing was quite,   difficult and complex, and then that kinda turned through in the taste. One of the things that wasn't favorable it was just someone at the time who cooked with mushrooms. Actually it's like hey I've got some oyster mushrooms let me just cook something like this and the I think it's the umami sort of taste that came out of it and the taste I went   wow this is actually different and I hadn't probably up to that point experienced that. I have a Colombian background it's very different in terms of how they grow with the food and stuff like that But ever since then in the market, and we're talking from the last time we talked about 3 years to now, the market has evolved, it has increased, there's a lot of other products that are in the market now that are meat alternatives   not all of them though however come from I guess the   mushroom themselves.  

One of the things I saw in terms of food was the processing   when it comes to I guess fables,   mushroom of choice and how that gets processed.   Talk about talk about that not in the complexity but what what is it that what's the unique point that you guys have that makes the food so   easily   treatable, not as complex, and at least,   from a price point perspective makes it an efficient or an effective,   sort of business to actually run-in comparison to other bigger place that aren't necessarily as cost efficient because of the processes.  

[00:07:18] Unknown:

Yeah. So most other meat alternatives are made from what's called textured vegetable protein, which is you basically take a a pea or a soy bean and you process those and turn them into meat. And if you think about a pea, like, actually a pea that you would, eat eat at home, and you think about meat, they're like 2 of the kind of it's like it's almost extreme opposites of each other. So the amount of processing that you need to do to turn a pea into meat,   there's a lot of steps that you got to do. So if it just very quickly high level, you've got to strip the fiber and the fat out from the pea, separate the protein,   turn the protein into a powder, then, you need to to basically turn that into a dough,   put it through an extrusion process, which is high heat, high pressure,   and, like, squeeze it out of a small small space, with the high heat and high pressure, which restructures   the proteins in the p,   and gives you sort of slightly more sort of meaty strands,   then you're left with this, sort of ingredient that sort of got the sort of got the protein texture of meat, structure of meat, but still tastes like a pea. So then you gotta add a whole bunch of other ingredients to try and mask the flavors of the pea and add kind of the medium army flavors. So turning a pea into meat,   a lot of processing, and in that processing,   you lose some of the health benefits of what or probably most of the health benefits of what the pee was originally,   and it's expensive processing. All of those steps to process the food costs, a lot of money. So you end up with a product that's actually yeah. Most meat alternatives are still more expensive than meat.  

Whereas,   you take mushrooms.   Mushrooms are are much closer   just straight off the bat to to meat and there's a there's a bunch of reasons for that. So   evolutionarily,   plants kind of branched off the tree of life much earlier   than   fungi branched off from animals and humans,   much later. So we're more closely   fungi are more closely related to animals and humans than they are to plants. There's a whole bunch of similarities   between fungi and animals.   For example, fungi   breathe oxygen and emit carbon dioxide, the same as what we do, but the opposite of plants. Plants,   breathe carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. So fungi is similar there. You put mushrooms out in the sun, they'll tan similar to what happens with our skin.  

And there's a whole bunch of similarities   because of that sort of closer evolutionary   relationship and   flavor and the particular flavor in the mushrooms is is another thing. So you get a lot of the same   chemical compounds that sort of glutamate,   that give you the umami flavor out of meat. Those all exist in mushrooms as well.   So   the processing that and you and you might remember growing up if if well, you grew up in Colombia. I don't know how how long you, when you moved to Australia. But in the nineties, the mushroom council   ran a campaign mushrooms meet for vegetarians. So there's kind of a bit of a history of using mushrooms as a sort of protein replacement for meat,   because of those similarities. So it's much easier to take a mushroom and turn it into something more meat like because it's got the glutamate. It's got the umami flavors in there. Texturally, mushrooms are a bit different to meat, so we have a couple of cook processes that we use to get the texture closer to meat, but, we don't need to do that whole high heat, high pressure extrusion process that you need to do to a pea. We don't need to strip out the fiber and the and the fats that you need to do to a pea. So it's a it's a much it's basically all steps that you could technically actually do in your kitchen with regular kitchen equipment to take a mushroom and turn them into into something meaty. Which I've seen before. I've seen and I've seen done well by someone who can't cook. I put my hand up, not a greatest cook, but it can be done and it can taste really, really great. Yeah.  



[00:10:58] Unknown:

The so one aspect is and I love the size out of it and and what it means in terms of   doing it from a mushroom as opposed to a pea and that kind of appeals to me in that manner. How does it appeal   to the financial side of a business? And what I mean by that is, and correct me here where I'm wrong, is I believe Fable went through a process of a series,   for,   raising some capital in terms of continuing to grow and moving towards being a net cash flow and positive cash flow company.   Is it or was it a hard conversation to be able   to find that money to raise in the   space that you guys work in? Is it a difficult pitch, I guess I would wanna say, in talking about mushrooms and what it means in terms of health benefits, all of that to  

[00:11:43] Unknown:

what that actually converts to from a financial, yep, we need this money to be able to continue the company and grow it into x y z. Yeah. It's an interesting question and and that's evolved a lot over the five and a half years of the business too. I think when we launched it or when we started in 2019, 2020,   the whole kind of meat alternative space was kinda booming.   Beyond Meat had sort of IPO'd,   Impossible Foods had raised a whole bunch of money. A bunch of cell based meat companies had raised a lot of money. And there was this,   this sort of excitement and enthusiasm and belief that,   the meat industry was gonna be disrupted over the next 10, 20 years. And instead of eating meat from animals,   we were gonna shift and most of the meat that humans were gonna eat was gonna come from plants or cell based or fungi or or something along these lines. And   meets a 2,000,000,000,000   US dollar industry. It's about 2% of global GDP.  

So, that's the kind of thing that then draws venture capital firms in because they're like, oh, wow. This is one of the biggest industries in the world. It's gonna change and shift a lot over the next couple of decades. So there's money to be made here so that they're interested in investing.   So early on in our journey, it was quite easy to raise capital from venture capital firms, be because of that that belief and that story.   But that shifted, like, the   the over the last 5 years, meat alternatives haven't. They're still less than 1% of the global market in meat. The shift hasn't happened in the way that everyone had sort of envisaged it might.   And there's a couple of reasons for that. Mhmm. Firstly,   the products just don't taste as good as meat. Like meat is delicious. You know, I didn't give up meat because I don't like the taste of it. Quite quite the opposite. Like, it was really hard to give up because meat is so delicious.  

And so if you're gonna get people to switch from eating meat from animals to something else, you'd have a product that it to be honest, it's gonna be better than meat because you've already all got you've already got all the habits and everything else, so you gotta get people to change. And and meat alternatives at the moment just don't don't taste as good as meat. It's simple yet any independent studies done on comparing them, they don't taste as good.   And then secondly, price. So taste and texture,   super important. Price also very important. Meat alternatives are still more expensive than meat. Chicken is very cheap.  

Beef, the, you know, the cheapest minced beef is still relatively cheap, and there's no meat alternatives,   that are comparable in price to those 2 sort of really high volume meats. Yes. Steak and and for our product replicating sort of pulled pulled shiitake mushroom product replicates sort of pulled beef, or pulled pork. Our product's a little bit cheaper than those sort of more premium slow cooked meats.   So there are some areas where meat alternatives are are competing on price,   effectively, but for the most part, they're still more expensive. So   trying to change consumer behavior, the two reasons primary things driving people eating, taste and texture and price, and the products aren't as good as animal meat on those two things. So, and then the third thing,   there is a big drive for consumers wanting to reduce meat consumption.  

It's health is the is the main driver as people as ethics, like, for me, not eating meat, that's that's probably my biggest one. There's also environmental issues, but those are pretty small. There's not that many people that are actually changing their behavior on those two things.   All the data says about a third of consumers in western markets   do want to reduce their meat consumption for, but it's for health reasons.   And the challenge with, having meat alternatives that are very heavily processed,   there's   a   in in reality, they still are probably healthier than eating meat. Like, the average Australian eats a 110 kilograms of land animals every year. It's a huge amount of meat, and eating that much meat, it's it's pretty clear that's not healthy for us, and it drives a lot of the to the heart disease and bowel cancer, those kinds of issues that we have.  

There's no fiber in meat and and and lots of saturated fat, lots of cholesterol.   But,   having   foods that are heavily processed and maybe have some artificial ingredients in and things like that certainly leaves it open for debate and discussion on are these products actually healthier than this. Any better than the alternative. Yeah. And so you've got these products out in the market that are they don't taste as good, that in many cases, twice as expensive, and it's debatable whether they're healthier than meat or not. So there's actually really a reason for consumers to shift. Yeah. And that's why,   yeah, meat alternatives are less than 1% of the of the market.  

So, yeah, our approach in the space has been to   keep working on our products to make to get them to a point where they taste ideally taste better than meat. And and in and in a lot of instances now, we we match meat. People can't tell the difference if it's in a burrito at Guzman and Gomez or a or a Peter at Zoo Street Greek,   between that and their pulled pork or their pulled beef,   we're priced kind of a little bit cheaper than those meats, into those restaurants. And, there's definitely a whole bunch of health benefits. Shiitake mushrooms are the most common ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.   Western science has caught up to all the health benefits. They're super high in fiber, high in vitamin d, high in, b vitamins,   a whole bunch whole bunch of, health benefits with them. And there's this whole people are becoming more aware of that. There's this sort of booming trend in mushrooms. People becoming more conscious that mushrooms are healthy.  

So that's sort of what's driven us in the space and how we're trying to, compete and help, compete against animal meat and help reduce meat consumption that way. Yeah. I know. And you you noted a piece which is is brilliant. It's a nice transition.  

[00:17:03] Unknown:

Consumers.   And this   so we're not gonna talk about Shoot of Prey, but go listen to the preview. Oh, you've talked about it before around   what unfortunately happened with Shoot of Prey, and it was to do with consumers and the expectation of what you thought at a at a scale versus what it was at probably a particular point. You talked to Kashi. And for post it, I Kashi is just an Australian,   a news presenter and has play conversations around business. One of the the learning points that you'd actually called out in that particular interview was around knowing what the consumer wants. Now, I want to understand is Fable at the moment and from what I recalled,   there was Fable that you could buy in stores. You could buy them, obviously, you guys are spreading out into restaurants as well. There might be other ways. What are your learnings now as a company scaling worldwide, not just Australia now, really worldwide   into how consumers are actually wanting to interact with this replacement, this with Fable. Is it really a buying it at the supermarket? Is it through retailers? Is it through restaurants and other sort of big chains where you, as you're saying, you don't know. You don't know that that's the alternative and you could almost very, very easily say   swap a burger for another burger or swap a pulled pork for the Fable equivalent. You don't even have to let consumers say it's just, hey, it's a little bit cheaper and it's hay the same. Okay? A consumer doesn't care. What's the market telling you? The wild fables growing. Yeah. So it's it's what con consumer behavior in food is, like, way more nuanced than I  

[00:18:29] Unknown:

had even dreamt it would be, when we started out. So,   and for example, the channel that the customer is buying in is so different. So buying food at a restaurant in sort of a food service setting, completely different to how consumers are thinking buying food in a supermarket.   And so we sort of naively went into both of those channels with basically the same product, the sort of pulled Hitachi product and thought, yep. It's gonna work on restaurant menus and, yep, it's gonna,   consumers are gonna be able to buy it in a in a retailer and know what to do with it and cook with it at home. And   yeah, basically, it it don't it worked in some initially, just in some niche areas in those two channels, but overall didn't really didn't work for the mass market in either of the channels.  

And so we've had to learn a lot, understand   the areas where it was working, why is it working there, and sort of really dig in and and and focus on those areas and then expand out from there. So, for example, in retail,   initially, we we went pretty wide. We went into like, Harris Farm and some of the premium independent retailers, and then we went into Woolies and then Kohl's, the 2 big retailers in Australia.   And it worked in Harris Farm and the premium independents.   I think the consumer shopping in those,   locations is a little bit more sort of food forward and and, sort of higher cooking capabilities,   but it didn't work well enough in Woolies and Coles. And we so we we actually did some consumer research where we had, consumers go into the store,   film themselves   buying the product, film themselves taking home and cooking with it. And it's kinda it was mind blowing. Like, the product   comes in a pack,   250   gram pack. It's like a yeah. Pulled shiitake mushroom product. It's got a pic had a picture at the time on the front of the product being cooked in a pan. Mhmm. But 20% of consumers when they got home with the products would just open the pack,   just reach in, pick it out, and just start eating it. No way. And we're like Really? We're like, what? Like, didn't even imagine. Like, then they and then they're like, it tastes okay, but I probably wouldn't buy it again. We're like Wow.  

Yeah. Of course, like, it's not gonna taste good. You haven't cooked it. And,   it's even got a picture, like, not let alone they don't even certainly not reading the cooking instructions,   not even paying attention to the image on the front of the pack. And what's what's even more amazing   find an image of produce it because I remember it. I the imaging in the packaging of fable was a really eye catcher. Black Yeah. Wide label with the fable on it on an angle down. You have the cookie, like, it's very memorable. Yeah. That is amazing that some people were just picking it up and eating it. It's not. Yep. And so it's, like, 20% of customers doing that. And then another sort of 20, 30% of customers saw the pan. Okay. They put it in a pan, but just really low heat and just basically warmed it. Didn't cook it at all. And, yeah, you don't get the best out of the product and and yeah. Your average consumer doesn't necessarily cook a lot. They they know how to cook mince. They know how to cook a burger. They know how to cook sausages.   But   they know how to cook mince. They know how to cook a burger. They know how to cook sausages.  

But this is a product format that they're not used to cooking. Like, you don't Yeah. Don't normally buy pulled pork or pulled beef or beef brisket and cook that at home. So they had no concept naturally of how to cook it. Yeah. Of course. And, you know, people are not gonna necessarily read instructions on a pack. They're just sort of breezing through and busy and everything else. So, yeah, most customers were having a really poor experience with the product and weren't loving it and weren't gonna repeat purchase because, obviously, because of that. So we realized, okay, if we need if we're gonna do retail, we've actually gotta simply we gotta, you know, source the product. We're gonna make it cook it more as, ourselves in our production process, make it just super simple, and we realize there's gonna be a lot of work that we have to do to get that right. So,   so then we looked at the food service channel and   in restaurants, we were succeeding in some restaurants and not in others. And we didn't we couldn't really understand why.  

So we also did a bunch of consumer research to understand how, what was happening in food service and   what we realized was in food service, you don't have to consumer doesn't have to worry about cooking it because the chefs cooked it. So that piece is out of the way so that that issue is gone.   But getting customers to order it, off the menu was a real challenge because it's a new and novel product. No one really knows what pulled shiitake   is gonna taste like. Yeah.   And so we needed to do things. When they ate it, they loved it. Like, people really liked it when they ate it. The chefs all were doing a good they they know how to cook, so they were doing a good job cooking it.   But get actually getting customers to try it out in the first first place was really difficult. So we looked we did a whole bunch of testing, and we realized that,   firstly, then what we call the product on menu makes a massive difference. So if we were calling it, like, plant based beef or plant based meats,   it wasn't selling well at all. We were sort of getting bucketed in the of it's I've tried based meats before. They're too processed. I don't like the taste of it. So that wasn't selling, but calling it,   calling it pulled Shiitake mushroom Mhmm. Was selling really well and literally   an 8 x difference. There'd be 8 times as many people ordering it if we called it pulled shiitake   compared with ordering it we're calling it plant based meat. So   we got that data. We can now show that to restaurants and they and they're all calling it full shiitake mushroom.  

Secondly, we see on restaurant menus, and this is this is broadly across the plant based meat space, but if a restaurant has a plant based section,   it actually performs quite poorly. Our dishes perform poorly in there because,   meat eaters basically skip over that section. So the only people looking at a plant based section are gonna be the vegans and vegetarians.   Whereas mushrooms, a lot of meat eaters love mushrooms, and they will order a mushroom dish. But if you put it in the plant based section They're not gonna look at it. They're not gonna look at it. Not see it in the first place. So you need to have the mushroom dishes out in the main section of the menu.   That was another learning.  

Our product has a is a, like, pretty good source of protein. It's got more protein in it than, a lot like a lot of other sort of just plain vegetable based, plant based dishes. So putting a protein call out on the menu is helpful.   And then,   in restaurant sampling,   is massive too. So a lot of the restaurant chains we partner with, if they ran a sampling campaign,   or or we ran that with them,   people would try it and then we get a really high  

[00:24:36] Unknown:

Well, once Once they've tried it and they understand the flavor and then you kind of skip by the grouping something underneath plant based and you go, oh, yeah. This is really nice of the flavor, which is kinda what you wanna get to. Exactly. Before we move on there, all these learnings that you're talking about   so, well, obviously, previously with choose a prayer, do you think that   if you hadn't gone through price of choose a prayer both the rise and the learnings and that coming down   would you have just picked would these learnings have come just as intuitively to yourself and the group that you've got around you? Or do you think it really needed you kinda needed choose a pride without work and get that really hard learning to see it so clearly now? Yeah. I think,  

[00:25:13] Unknown:

I think it certainly helps having learned those hard lessons of not having done that consumer research properly in Shoes of Prey and the business not succeeding, I think, primarily because we didn't understand the customer well enough.   I think having had those experiences definitely made me much more   aware of the benefits of consumer research and insights and the need to do it.   Yeah, I got a lot of respect for other entrepreneurs who realize that from the get go and and do that detailed consumer research. But I think as an entrepreneur, it's easy to skip over that because you   naturally such a kind of optimist and just think things are gonna work and and,   often entrepreneurs are in a category or a space that they know well and that the customer They think they're the customer themselves, but, yeah, there's there's just so much nuance to consumer behavior.  

Different customers react in different ways or different customer segments,   that that behave very differently. And,   yeah, it's been super helpful. And and just the team,   that we've got too. We've got quite a few ex Shoes of Pride people in Fable, so they also went through that,   that journey and had those learnings. And,   yeah, a couple of the team are really, really good sort of consumer insights, data data analytics people.   Thinking, yeah, Chris McCallum, our COO, and Joy Davis, our chief of staff. They've spent a lot of time   delving into all of this consumer research insights work,   for Fable, and that's been super helpful. I mean, powerful as well that you've  

[00:26:38] Unknown:

been alongside a lot of these individuals for a long time as well. Right? There's there's a lot of cohesion in how people work over time that you really build, and you don't have that necessarily on a short term as well as when you have to have the hard conversations where, hey. This is actually not working. Before we get to the team, though, that's gonna be a really big piece I wanna talk about. It's just lastly on the cost to customer side of things   that to me moving from I guess what was just Australia for a little while and started to branching out you guys are now quite big on the US, UK,   Singapore which really was just at the beginning of conversations around 3 years ago. Have you seen   and have you tried to really keep a close eye on the differences that are happening across the different locations? Like what are either A, what are the biggest like outstanding differences where you go okay this is really different in the US market versus the Australian market or are you guys putting a lot of extra energy as well with all of the learnings to make sure that it's targeted to the market and to the, you know, geographical location based on  

[00:27:36] Unknown:

what the customers are like in that space. Yeah. We picked we picked those markets because at least the cuisine's relatively similar.   You know, US might skew a little more towards burgers. Australia maybe skews a little more towards Asian food. Singapore skews a little more towards Asian food. But for the most part,   you know, you have all of the same cuisines in those markets.   And so, as opposed to going into trying to go into, say, Japan or China or or other markets like that.   So having similar cuisines in the markets that we're operating in has been helpful,   and and similar kinda consumer   behavior like that   that sort of calling a product pulled Shiitake mushroom we've seen in our data   that's has the same benefit in Australia, in the US, in the UK, in Singapore.  

Yep. So so getting that naming and all of that research that we've done,   applies across all the markets.   Where there have been differences,   has been more sort of mark around market structure. So in the US, in the food service restaurant channel,   distribution,   is much hard, much more difficult. So, that's been distribution's basically   the logistics of getting our product into restaurants.   So in Australia, there's a few sort of distribution companies,   that, there's not that many of them. There's a few of them that all of most of the restaurants will work with.   And so once you once we get into, say, a Guzman and Gomez,   or a or a Fishbowl or Azusa Street Greek, they have the distributor they work with. That distributor will then take our product, then our product is now stocked in all of those distributors' warehouses across the country, and then lots of other restaurants can order the product. It's, like, easy to easy from there to get it out to other restaurants.  

The UK is fairly similar   because, most of a lot of the market is just condensed in and around London. So, again, a small smallish number of distributors.   But the US is such a big market and there's so many different geographical regions that there's a lot of a lot of different distributors in the different geographies.   And then the 2 really big distributors, Cisco and US Foods, they they ask they cover the whole country.   They're so massive that it's,   they're very selective about what companies   they'll take on and put products in, and they've all got, like each of them have got, like, 30, 40, 50 where big warehouses across the country, plus a lot of smaller ones. So even if you get into Cisco through one chain that you sign up, maybe that'll only put you in a small section of the of the market. Doesn't guarantee you to actually be in the Yeah. Yeah. Not okay. So it's taken us sort of 3 years. We're now at the point where we've got coverage across the whole, US market, but it's,   there's still a few little gaps to fill in, but, but it's taken us 3 years to build that up in the US. So you got this funny and and a lot of chains   can't range you until you've got distribution because they might not have the sort of the power with the Cisco or the US Foods to say, well, you know, I've got 5 restaurants. I wanna put Fable in my 5 restaurants.  

The the distributor is not gonna Yeah. They they they they they they they bought Fable for 5 restaurants. Exactly. So,   so they got this kind of chicken and egg problem where you need to get distribution to be able to get into the restaurants, but you can't get into the restaurants until you got distribution. So that just   takes a while to get and to build up and to and to get sorted out. So,  

[00:30:49] Unknown:

that's made our launch into the US market sort of just it just has to take more time to build up, but we've kind of got there now. Yeah. So US now, if you're looking at the video behind Michael is this wonderful view. There's a lot of trees and you can see the sky and those animals as well as I was driving here. You're gonna be venturing off to the US to New York specifically very shortly.   1, New York, first of all.   2,   any any any anxious thoughts given the last time you also traveled over to the US I believe it was LA was for Shoes of Prey.   So any anxiety around that and any any reason why New York whether it's a central hub or the like? Yeah. Good question, and definitely,  

[00:31:29] Unknown:

plenty of, anxieties around it. So,   yeah. Yeah. We moved for Shoes of Prey. We kinda moved our headquarters from Australia to the US as we start expanding to the US market. We picked LA,   sort of good fashion hub,   time zones with Australia and Asia, whether it's about team was were a little bit closer, 3 hours closer,   and we moved 23 Australians over, whether in lifestyle and everything in LA, you know, much more similar to Sydney where we'd all been based. So that's kinda why we picked LA.   This time around,   we've base basic so and basically then, yeah, Shoes of Prey   didn't didn't work out, so we ended up closing the business and and moving back. So this is kinda take 2 on the on trying to do that. Take the take a build a business and take it to the US market.  

So definitely some anxieties around, okay, will will we get it right this time and or will we end up in the same spot as Shoes of Prey? I think we're in a much better spot, but definitely some anxieties around that. This time we picked New York rather than, LA.   Why? I think our experience living in LA   we're we're gonna go over for yeah. As you can see here, there's a beautiful place to live on the Sunshine Coast. Yeah. We've got 41 acre property here. We love it. Kids love it. It's   hard personally to leave this and going to either, yeah, either LA or New York in the US. It's got a big shift. It's a big shift and and New York's, like, really the complete opposite of living here.   But we we can see there's gonna be lots of benefits for the business, so we're excited to go and do it.  

But picking   we we we may go for 12 months and then come back. We'll sort of evaluate and see, but, but we really wanna get networked into particularly the food industry in the US.   And the challenge with LA that we found when we lived there is,   it's   a very spread out city, and there's no real central hub. So we lived in VetterSpeech. A lot of good stuff happens around VetterSpeech. A lot of really good health and wellness   CPG brands come from that area. So that would probably be where we would live again if we went to LA.   But you've also got downtown, you've also got East LA, you've,   got sort of Orange County. There's all these other places where things are going on. The traffic gets so bad in LA that, if there's an event on downtown on a Friday night, you live in Bettis Beach, takes you 2 hours to get there. So you just don't go there. So you actually don't really live in LA. You live in the spot where you're settling.  

Yeah. And so you it's harder to get networked in because of because of all of that. Whereas, New York, you've it's way, way more condensed. You got the subway system, so you actually can get to events, you know, within half an hour, pretty much from from anywhere.   And so for if we're only gonna go for a year or 2, maybe maybe we'll stay longer.   But if we really the goal is to get networked in, it's gonna be so much easier to do that in New York because, we can get to events and stuff much, much more easily.   Also, pretty much everyone in the US travels to New York at least once a year, if not more, or at least people in the food industry or or in our sort of space.  

So and and they may not necessarily do that in LA or if they do, again, they'll be on they might visit the other side of town and not where you are. So   even for the people who live in, you know, Whole Foods is based in Austin, and, you know, there's lots of other people we wanna meet with in in the US.   But those people will all pass through New York at some point. So it also makes meeting easier because we'll be in a spot where they come and visit, and that might sort of make it easier to prompt to visit. So,   yeah, it's still a tough choice because we loved LA. We've got friends in LA from when we lived there. The weather's great in LA. Beaches, lifestyle.  



[00:34:58] Unknown:

But, yeah, we decided to settle on, go go to New York this time. Yeah. I mean, it's really exciting things which Yeah. And it went I was gonna ask you why not someone would like Austin,   because it is a little bit central from what I'm at least in the channels that I see and I hear of of the US, it just seems like everyone's congregating around Austin. We lived in Fort Worth or at least my family did for a long time. I didn't know the area, and even then it was really nice. So I go, that was interesting why why New York, but I think the the centrality,   a lot of people who have   in part or passing talked about food, a big piece of cuisine and, you know, what happens is in New York and New York City. So, yeah, it also makes sense for that.  

Was there, and this is I guess a bit more of a personal question for yourself,   was there either a particular   reasoning? It was a was a data, was there something within the company   that broke the straw? It's like, okay, we need to move over. This is the reason we need to move over and not say here. Was there a particular reason for yourself,   company wise, whatever, that that made you go,   look, there might be some anxiety, but there's an overall reason as to why. Yeah. What what's that reason that makes you go, I can't just stay here to be able to to continue with this? Yeah. It's probably probably a couple of things. So,  

[00:36:09] Unknown:

our core sort of niche segment that we've done really well in is premium quick service restaurant chains,   that maybe have a bit of a health focus. So it's it's places like Guzman and Gomez. You know, they have their clean is the new healthy sort of,   messaging and and marketing positioning.   They have a clean label, no artificial ingredients menu.   So, yeah, our product performs really well in somewhere like Gossaman and Gomez, similarly with,   Fishbowl, similarly with, Zoo Street Greek and a lot of the other, restaurants and restaurant chains that were in in Australia.   But we're now in most of those chains that kind of fit in that niche in Australia and,   Hugh Watson on our team in Australia is doing an awesome job getting us into the remainder of the managing all those accounts and getting us into the remainder of them.  

My my   if I had to pick them as an entrepreneur, you're kind of a jack of all trades, but maybe not necessarily specialized in anything in and I'm really good at anything in particular, but probably the area that is my strength,   also is sales.   And so there's not not as much there's still plenty plenty of places and we wanna branch out of those niches in Australia.   But,   there's not as much selling for me to do in Australia. Also, being on the Sunshine Coast, a lot of sales that I end up doing just like video calls or Yeah. Or I gotta travel to Sydney and Melbourne.   So a bit little bit   greater lifestyle it is. We're a bit isolated from customers here.  

The US, the market's sort of 13 to 15 times the size of what it is in Australia.   Mexican cuisine, we've also done particularly well in. Mexican cuisine is huge   in the United States. Lots of those premium   health focused Mexican chains in the US.   So,   yeah, for me to be able to help,   on the sales side and maybe do the thing that I do best selling,  

[00:37:55] Unknown:

my skills are gonna be way more beneficial to the company if I'm able to do that in the US rather than in Australia. Yeah. No. And and look, that's a a massive call out because unless you're in the hot board where things are happening, like, it's just it it's much easier to make things happen where you're in and around the things that are happening Yeah. As opposed   to being somewhere else in a slightly more remote area, but you have to go and venture to find those things. Right? The catalyst, they're gonna come to you. You're there to make them happen. Yep. For for yourself then, what success and I'm not talking here financially for the company because that makes sense. Right? You you want a company that's gonna gonna be cash flow positive and it's gonna grow and you get more employees and it gets brought up, that's fine. But in ATU perhaps, what would be the success what do you see as success   or fable   in moving to the US and supporting across the world?  

What would that be this   how would you describe success to you for company and for yourself to achieve x? Is it gonna be   is it is it gonna be tied specifically, do you think, to the more the finances of the company? Is it gonna be, you know what?   That's amazing. I I I see this product all over the place and it's something that we help grow. What defines that success for you? If it isn't if it isn't financial.  

[00:39:03] Unknown:

Yeah. Ultimately, I mean, the the genesis of starting the company was wanting to help end industrial animal agriculture. And so, yeah, that's, I guess, the yardstick that, I would use to define success. Obviously, yeah, financial, all those pieces are nice as well,   and put it for us as a family maybe. But but up the ultimate yardstick is yeah, can can we make a dent in in helping in industrial animal agriculture?   And that's, yeah, kind of all the worst parts of, animal agriculture of, yeah, factory farming and   and and, yeah, all the sort of bad environmental, ethical, and   and for human health,   aspects that come from that.  

So   if and, basically, in order to help make a dent in that,   we wanna have people eating more mushrooms than eating animal meat. So the average Australian   eats a 110 kilograms of land animals every year and eats about 2 and a half kilograms of mushrooms.   So we wanna try and get that going the other way. And in the US, it's a similar amount of meat, about a 110 kilograms of land animals and even less mushrooms. They Less mushrooms. They've Yeah. About one point 3 kilos of mushrooms every year. So There's a there's a couple of factors, like, levels of fact of multipliers that you could get in terms of people receiving and eating to get it on par or, you know, going from 50 to like and moving towards it. And so there's a lot that would need to be done. I mean, it's literally almost a 100 times more meat than mushrooms in the US. So   if we could make some impact on bringing that, you know, closer to the middle when and even if even even if it's not the middle I mean, it'd be great to get to middle. It'd be great to get to the other way, but if we can have some meaningful impact on that difference, that's probably the success. Key metric that I'll look at. Yeah. No. It's awesome. And the team,  

[00:40:38] Unknown:

growing a company. So in Shoes of Prey again you've you've grew that company a lot of people you mentioned from Shoes of Prey into Fable and sort of continuing   what is the   one   two things that you and I guess the more executive group of the company at Fable try to do to make sure that you've got the right individuals working within the company? What what are the things that you try to do to foster the right culture   for the right work ethic, the right people? What would be those things if you had to, like, look internally at the company and go, that's a 1 or 2 things that we do really right to make sure that we've got the right people working on the right things.  

[00:41:14] Unknown:

I guess, try to find people who are intrinsically motivated in what they're doing in their role. So   it can't be helpful for us hiring people who are vegan or vegetarian because they're maybe also mission driven around what we're doing, but most most of the team aren't vegan or vegetarian.   But,   but maybe they maybe they love sort of healthier whole food diets or,   or they're just   a gun on sales, and they just love sales and selling. And,   that just gets them up every morning being in a sales role with a with a product that's,   that's, not too difficult and is interesting to sell. So we try to find people who are intrinsically motivated in some way in the role that they're doing. So going to work for them is fun and exciting and not necessarily a chore.  

That's helpful.   And then we're a fully remote   team. We sort of we were set up that way from the start, kind of by necessity. I think there's a lot of benefits to actually having a team in a central office. But for us, we,   we've got operations all over the world, salespeople all over the world, so we just physically can't. There's no way we could actually all be colocated. So had a remote team from day 1.   Says a lot of things we do to try and tighten the culture there. So,   the last 2 years, we've done, like, a global team off-site,   each year. And,   for a week. Travel everyone travels to travel to Malaysia. We've done in Malaysia the last 2 years.  

And those have been, like, super amazing experiences. Everyone's, like it's just been amazing watching everyone have a great time together in person,   bonds, just get on super well, and then just seeing the impact of that on our culture afterwards. Like, suddenly, these people that you only deal with on video, you've actually spent time with them, got on well with them. Yeah. We're all on this kind of mission and journey together, and I think we're, like, actually a really tightly bonded team from having those offsides. And, yeah, I know everyone's actually, a couple of people even got fable tattoos at the end of the at the end of our last off-site. Like, they're just so so bought into it.   And,   and, yeah, I think everyone's looking forward to we had the last one just in April or May. Mhmm. So it's still 9, 10 months away till the next one, but everyone's already looking forward to doing the next one because, yeah, it's just just a really awesome experience. Yeah. There's a few companies I've heard that that have been either remote for since their reception or or shifted over through through COVID times. And  

[00:43:34] Unknown:

now   that inverse of, hey. We'll meet up once or twice a year, and that is everyone's, like, looking forward to it, but just that alone to drive the mission and it'd be about the cohesion of the team versus Yeah. Anything else I'd be. Yeah. Definitely have heard that had that as well.   In and   it sounds like have you had to in in general with the company? Has it been beyond the individuals from Shoes of Pride that have come around? Has it been a hard sell to bring on individuals into the company? And what I mean by that is has it been largely, okay, we need this extra person,   I'm gonna go and put it out for a hire and let's try and find them. Or have you seen that a lot of people whether, you know, they they care about,   a healthier view or just know about Fable have come to you to say, Michael, whoever in the in the company, like, I wanna work here. I wanna work for this particular,  

[00:44:21] Unknown:

product or idea or, you know, vision that you guys have got here. Yeah. So yeah. So with for context, I guess, we're 20 people, so not huge. We haven't had to go out and hire at scale   yet. So   I think most of our hiring has been,   either people approaching us or people in our close kinda networks. Yep.   Yeah. Like, I think a quarter of the team are Xues of Prey, for example, 5 of us. And,   yeah, then we've kinda met people along the way and and got to know people maybe for a year before they've joined us or they've done some consulting work for us before they've joined us. So this sort of size, it's been easier   to have people either approach us or more, yeah, people in our networks.  

That'll obviously change as we scale.   Probably the the yeah. Salespeople is sales sales and marketing people are probably just over half of the company, and we need to hire those people in the markets where we're selling.   So those have probably been the roles where sometimes, yeah, we've had to go and advertise and and go through a bunch of resumes and do some of that more traditional sort of hiring process. Yep.  

[00:45:26] Unknown:

But we've yeah. This sort of scale, we've been able to, take the time and find the right people and people who are kind of, yeah, values and mission aligned and intrinsically motivated in what we're doing. Yeah. That which is awesome. When when you have a lot of those people, it makes it a lot easier to to work with them as well because they wanna be working there as well. It's just for a one single maybe aspect of of work. Yep. The final question I have for you, Michael, is you have 2 young kids, a little bit older than my my 14 month old daughter. But they they understand that. They see the world. They've experienced living here, and they're gonna be moving to to New York. It's gonna be a whole host of experiences.   How do you describe   and how do you talk to your kids about   maybe what Fable is, but maybe more holistically and getting back to the beginning of this conversation about health health and eating well and what it means to them.  

Do they understand and resonate with the the conversations about Fable and what that means to them? Do they not understand and and look at me? How does how does that shift? How's that conversation happening with  

[00:46:20] Unknown:

a generation that's sort of coming along into into a new world. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I try not to sort of force it all on them. Like, we,   I'm obviously vegan.   At home,   we eat   well, the kids eat at least vegetarian   at home.   Yeah. Almost completely vegetarian, but they still have eggs and cheese. And   when we go out, fine for them to eat meat if they want to.   So we've kind of just, yeah, brought them up that way. We obviously have to, you know, we're   Trina, my wife runs marketing for Fable, so we kinda live, work, and and life blend together so they hear and see all the conversations that are going on around the business. So they kind of get it. They're excited about mushrooms and it's been interesting watching watching them. I watched them at a barbecue at a friend's place recently, and they went up and got my son 7 year old son went up and got a burger, a beef burger,   and went back and ate it. He took a bite of it, kinda screwed up his face, opened up the burger, took the beef patty off, and then ate the burger without the beef patty. So I guess just because he's grown up not eating beef, he just didn't like the flavor of it. And so doesn't doesn't wanna eat it.  

So   yeah. So I think they've yeah. Trying not to force it on them, but I think just because this is all around them, they they sort of adopt some of that stuff. Yeah. They come down in the veggie garden with me sometimes and,   help me weed the garden and pick,   pick the cherry tomatoes and eat them and, see the pumpkins growing and then maybe help make some pumpkin soup or whatever out of out of the stuff that's grown in there. So I think just   we've got a big patch of bananas as well. We get get a lot of bananas, so they they love coming down into the bananas and playing down there while I'm sort of   sort of,   doing things in there to help the bananas grow and picking harvesting the bananas.  

So I think just having that all around them, I guess, will,  

[00:48:05] Unknown:

yeah, sort of get them interested in the space by osmosis that sort of By being around it. Yeah. And I think it's it's something me and my partner with our young daughter similar things in other aspects of life for us, health and fitness and Yeah. All the all the likes and I've always thought, yeah, I don't wanna push it on the jewels because you know but by being around spaces and the environment things that you're doing you're just gonna be wanting to be in that space now. Exactly. Kind of certainly makes me think you talk about New York, it's just gonna be the space by osmosis you can have that network but when it comes to food production is for everyone sort of listening as well something like Fable and the alternatives.   It's not until you are   not singling and spacing them out into their own sections where you're not gonna venture because I'm not this. Right? You you bucket it into a different space, but it's   just in unison with, as you say, and a menu that you're not actually seeing whether it's a this or that. It's just here's the alternative.  

Once we see it start seeing that which is awesome to see from the data you go, yep, that's when you start seeing a bit a bigger integration   of some of these products where it's all about taste, price and you're not worrying about what grouping am I placed into.   Michael, appreciate taking the time as well and making yourself available here at home. All the best over in New York as well and for people to reach out to you, I think LinkedIn's probably gonna be the best place. But if you're listening to this,   New York and a couple of other places and you're interested from a restaurant perspective or distribution,   definitely reach out to Michael. Anything else, mate, that you wanna, leave the listeners with as well? No. Thanks for thanks for coming by, Juan. Really good to meet in person this time. I think we did, yeah, we did the last one on video. It's probably even at the end of COVID 3 years ago. Oh, was it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably couldn't have met in person if we wanted to. So And I actually looked at looking back at that, I went yeah. So I went, you know, because I've done this and there's a couple of things around the time. Oh, yeah. I forgot. We couldn't we couldn't even travel and do these things. So, yeah. It's it's nice to get out and Yeah. And go to places and meet people in person. So I appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for coming, Juan. Yeah. Good chatting.