Well, MP readers, let us introduce you to someone who does: Anh Van, the co-founder of La Foundary, a sustainable packaging company that uses the powers of bioengineering to challenge how packaging is made.
By day, Van works at Vow, a venture capital-backed lab-grown meat company. By night and on weekends, Van pours her energy into La Foundary, a start-up that also has sustainability at its core.
Now 24, Van moved to Australia from Vietnam by herself when she was 16 to study. She was immediately struck by two marked differences from her homeland.
Firstly, her teachers in Vietnam were far more focused on method and memorisation. In Australia, educators such as her high school biology professor Mr Parker would challenge her to not simply take in information, but to also consider how stuff works. Secondly, she found that Australians to be way more conscious of living systems and sustainability in general.
“When I first came here, and they were talking about green materials and green chemistry, it switched a light on. And I reflected, thinking ‘Oh, we don’t do a lot of that in Vietnam,’” she says.
For Van, this initial awakening led her to reflect more deeply on her childhood. Nature-filled as it was, cheap materials like plastic styrofoam boxes at restaurants and visible landfill were also highly present fixtures.
While studying bio-engineering at the University of Queensland, Van had time to apply her growing awareness to her actual work. And during a Startmate Student Fellowship program, Van met the people who would become her future co-founders, Melody Wu and Shikhar Thakhuri.
The innovation at the heart of La Foundary is predicated on feeding waste products – like food waste – to fungi. The fungi eats the material, it reproduces, and as part of this process, creates a range of filaments called mycelium. As the mycelium expands and takes over the whole waste itself, it gives the material unique capabilities like water resistance, fire resistance, and thermal insulation. Beyond these benefits, Van and her team are also working on reducing the density of their mushroom packaging creation. Despite the fact that it is not biodegradable, one of styrofoam’s great advantages is that it’s very, very light. Van’s team benchmark the density of their own material at La Foundary against styrofoam.
The technology is coming along nicely, so the next question is… who will buy? I ask Van about La Foundary’s first customer. Her answer is surprising.
“Packaging happened to be a compelling story, so we initially went down that route. We did some testing with a ceramic artist called Snakebird down in Melbourne, to help improve the appearance. And while we’re not selling it yet in terms of the packaging side of things, our first paying customer was actually using our material as a decorative product,” she explains.
Now, La Foundary is creating bespoke art pieces, which the team are able to sell at a margin of around 40 per cent. After all, the raw materials needed all come from waste. It’s a full circle moment for Van, who loved making art as a child, but dropped it when she first entered high school.
One economic advantage of this approach is that the money earned from selling the art pieces can be reinvested back into the more capital intensive requirements of building up the manufacturing and distribution capacities of a fully-fledged packaging company. The hope from here is they’ll find Australian customers willing to pay relatively high prices for sustainable packaging, which the company can then bring down over time as they achieve economies of scale.
“I always joke about this. La Foundary started because I wanted to create a new material to do art with. And it just somehow worked in a commercial scale,” she says.
Van reconnected with her artistic side during her final year of school, after applying for a Blackbird Foundation grant to spend time exploring lost identity for the Vietnamese diaspora through art. I ask Van who this project was intended for, and what she’d like Australians to be more conscious of when it comes to Vietnamese history and the experiences of the diaspora.
“As a child I loved to draw, and I also grew up near the ethnic minority in Vietnam. We grew up in a city called Pleiku. My grandfather had this big garden, my Mum and Dad being working people back then were always really busy, so my grandfather would take me to the garden and teach me about the art, the culture, and the way these people live. Their culture is so rich, it’s textiles, it’s art, spiritual as well. And there’s always been some part of me that really treasures that relationship I had with them,” she explains.
“As I grew up, I lost touch with that – and although that is not my culture, admittedly in Vietnam, we have a lot of people coming from different ethnic minorities. In my middle school class, there was this one kid who came from an ethnic minority class who didn’t feel in touch with it, because his family didn’t practise any of that kind of thing anymore. When I came to Australia, as a way to understand my Vietnamese heritage more, I dug deeper and came to understand Vietnam as a whole.”
At this point, Van raises her hands to draw a circle in the air symbolising her grandfather and his garden, and then draws a ring of concentric circles around that first circle to represent the different surrounding villages that they would visit.
It’s clear that wordy chat alone can’t fully convey what she’s trying to express about the interrelationships between her younger self, her grandfather, and the Vietnamese ethnic minority she used to visit as a child.
Next up for La Foundary, a research agreement and partnership with the University of Queensland will help the team keep innovating the material itself. A new design studio launched in November 2024 called Bizarre Labs will help the company reach customers interested in the art side of the business.
Fundraising is on the cards… but not just yet. Van says her team needs more time and experience first.
“We want to have a clear, critical pathway and focus on one product before we pitch to investors,” she says. “Hopefully by next year, we’ll be able to have that conversation.”
