Startup adding value to the meat industry
You want added value? Southern Lights Biomaterials cornered the global market in animal tissue products
Friday, February 05 2010 || News || BY Lesley Springall
SLB collects animal tissue products — bovine collagen — often seen as a waste product, or pet food staple, from our meat industry and sells it to global pharmaceutical companies to make heart valves, pelvic floor patches and a range of artificial skin products.
Peter Meyer, SLB’s American founder, didn’t want to reveal too much about the company’s success, but chuckled when asked about margins. “It’s small, but perfectly formed,” he says. SLB turns over just under $5 million and employs six people, contracting out most of its needs.
Meyer’s not one to mince words: our more traditional primary industry companies’ claims to add value are “bullshit”, he says. “When they’re getting good commodity prices, they don’t think about all of those little extras they could get.”
What matters, says Meyer, is a focus on understanding how to create value for customers, not simply focusing on what can be supplied to the market. He and business partner Geoffrey Bennett were surprised they could see the obvious potential of the business where others couldn’t.
Meyer, a former investment banker who became an entrepreneur and ‘venture developer’, says he was lucky. While helping a young company break into the US pharmaceutical sphere, he was asked if he could set up a supply chain of New Zealand’s bovine collagen — much sought after because it is free of BSE or ‘mad cow disease’ — for the medical device industry.
Pharmaceutical companies had tried to source the product direct, but because their volume needs were relatively small, they didn’t get anywhere. “We figured out how to get the meat company guys to cooperate,” says Meyer.
